


Catch Me If You Can (Come and Hold My Hand)

by ofhobbitsandwomen (litvirg)



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Bellarke, F/M, roadtrip au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-29
Updated: 2016-04-17
Packaged: 2018-03-26 05:48:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 51,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3839377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/litvirg/pseuds/ofhobbitsandwomen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>August, 1990.</em>
  <br/>
  <em>This was stupid, she thought. She didn’t know why she sounded so hopeful that this stranger, this man who could be anything, a murderer or a criminal, or crazy, would nod his head and say yes he was going somewhere and yes she could come along. But standing in the middle of the nearly empty gas station parking lot she couldn’t help but feel like a lot was riding on his answer. So she held her breath as he considered her offer.</em>
  <br/>
  <em>“Tag along if you want,” he said, noncommittally. “I don’t really care.”</em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_August, 1990._

The clicking of the turn signal was all he could hear. Click click. Click click. Click click. Back home, it said. Over and over and over. _Back home, back home back home._

That was the problem though. He didn’t want to go back home. 

Not to that empty house. Not to that town of people staring as he walked down to the shop for work. Not to a medicine cabinet full of bottles and pills that did nothing, or a dumpster down the corner full of needles. Not to any of it. 

_Back home, back home, back home._

Click click. Click click. Click click. 

The light turned green, but his foot was frozen on the brake. He couldn’t move, he couldn’t lift his foot. It was stuck. As soon as he lifted his foot he’d be driving back to that for sale sign, back to a dead end job and a dead end life, with no one around to give enough of a shit if he ever made it out. 

The blare of a horn sounded from behind him, but he couldn’t lift his foot. Not if he lifted it and had to turn left. A car whipped around him, the flash of a hand, sticking a finger up at him whizzing by as they drove past.

There was a lump in his throat. There was no point. No point in going back to Ark. No point in going back to that house, no point in going back to that job. No point in any of it. 

He flicked the turn signal off. A little puff of air slipped out of his mouth and he wasn’t even sure if it was a sigh of relief or anticipation or just a slip of air getting past on accident. 

He lifted his foot and went straight. 

***  
_Two Hours Earlier_

“Jesus, Octavia,” he said, heaving a box up the last flight of stairs. “Did you pack everything you’ve ever owned?”

Octavia snorted. “Yeah, like that’s a lot.”

The joke rolled off her tongue so easily that it shouldn’t have bothered him, but it prickled at the back of his neck. He bit his lip. It wasn’t his fault, he knew that. 

He’d done the best he could. Ten hours a day with his hands inside a car’s engine, staining his hands an even deeper shade of brown was proof enough of that. 

It was worth it, because it got Octavia to school. She was starting college, she was going to get a degree. She wasn’t even stuck at Ark Community College, like he’d been, for that one semester before their mom got sick. He’d gotten her there. State School. Not community college. A real, full, live-in college, with dorms and dining halls and residence programs and connections. 

The hallway was dingy though. Not as pristine as he’d imagined it, and the stairwell smelled a lot more like mold than the pamphlet had advertised and he tried to focus on Octavia’s smile, instead of the weird stains in the carpets as they walked toward her room, because she couldn’t believe she was there, and if he just focused on how happy she was then he wouldn’t have to focus on remembering all those extra shifts he turned down and where she could be if he hadn’t. 

“You’ve got the look on your face,” Octavia said, turning to him and taking the box out of his hands once they reached her room. 

“What look?”

Octavia just raised her eyebrow at him and shook her head. “This is good, Bell. I swear. I’m lucky you did what you did for me to get here.”

He looked around as she started unpacking her boxes. Her roommate, a girl named Echo according to the name on the door, hadn’t gotten there yet so Octavia’s boxes were scattered all over both sides of the room. She had old posters draped across her desk. the edges tattered from where she had peeled them off her bedroom wall at home before rolling them up in a rubber band and packing them into Bellamy’s truck. 

There were already clothes spilling out of three of the boxes, sneakers and ripped jeans and oversized flannels that she had constantly been bringing home after thrift shopping with her friends, pretending, he knew, that they just thought it was fun, instead of admitting they didn’t want to ask him to drive them twenty minutes out to the mall a few towns over where they wouldn’t be able to afford anything anyway. She had one small box of books, most given to her from Bellamy, and he couldn’t help the smile that crept up on his face when he saw she’d labeled that box “fragile” in a black permanent marker. 

“So,” he said, folding up some of her clothes and putting them in her dresser. “What’s the plan for after you unpack? Want to grab some lunch?”

“Actually,” Octavia said turning toward him, a guilty look on her face. “There’s a student meet-up in the Union. Something about clubs and stuff I think.” She hesitated, waiting for Bellamy to jump in, but he just nodded at her. 

“I mean,”she hurried on. “It’s probably going to be super lame and awkward, but I don’t know it might be a good idea to try and meet some people and see what it’s like.”

Bellamy smiled and pulled her into a hug. “You don’t have to explain yourself, O,” he assured her, messing up her hair for good measure. She swatted his hand away. “This is your first day of college, you get to choose what to do. I can stop at that burrito place on the way home anyway.”

Octavia frowned at him. 

“Why are you even going home?”

Bellamy huffed out a laugh. “You’re kidding right?” She didn’t say anything. “O, I’ve got a job. And the house. It doesn’t all go away just because you do.”

He winced at his wording, but she didn’t react to the harshness of his words, just continued to stare at him, brows furrowed. 

“You’re selling the house. Everything’s packed up. And you could do so much better than that job, Bell--”

“There’s nothing wrong with my job. If you forgot, it’s what got you here in the first place.” 

He felt his neck flush and a wave of embarrassment washed over him. He didn’t know why he was defending his job, not to Octavia. He worked awful hours, barely got any sleep, and could hardly scrape together enough money to feed them, pay their living expenses, and still file away some to put toward her school. He never planned on staying there so long, but he couldn’t help feel his wall throw itself back up as she repeated everything he’d ever heard. 

“You’re better than that job. You could do whatever you wanted, you could go back to school, get out of Ark. Just get out of Ark, Bell.”

He slammed another box onto her bed. “I’m sorry life in Ark was so terrible for you but I can’t just pick up and leave. You want to go to school? You need money to pay for it.”

“This year is paid for,” she protested weakly. 

“Yeah and what about next year?” He watched as her face turned red. “You think you’ll be able to make enough for another year at school with a summer job?”

“God, you’re so afraid that you won’t even listen when I say exactly what you’ve been thinking since you graduated high school!” Octavia’s voice was raised. Loud. He was sure anyone in her hallway, anyone in their rooms down at the end of the hall could hear them. 

“Afraid?”

“You’re afraid that you’re never going to be anything,” she said, poking his chest. “Any you know what? You’re right. Not if you stay in Ark. And if you go back, when you could move on, you’re never going to leave.”

He shook his head. It wasn’t that simple. She never had to do what he did so she didn’t get it. Didn’t get that you couldn’t just pack up and leave, not when people were counting on you. Not when you had to make sure the shit wasn’t going to hit the fan again. It was different for him. He couldn’t just walk away from it all. 

“Just give yourself a chance,” she whispered to him. She reached out to touch his arm, but he stepped back, shrugging her off. “It’s not like you have to worry about paying for mom’s medicine anymore--”

“I need some air,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

*** 

She was right. 

He knew she was right. He’d never be anything in Ark. He never was anything in Ark. He was the kid with the mom nobody would walk near, nobody would hire, nobody would talk to. He was the kid who knew the sheriff by name because he’d been in the station so much as a kid, he was the kid who fought so often in the schoolyard, they stopped letting him through the doors. He was the kid who had tried to go to college, but couldn’t get out of his stupid town, who’d tried to settle for community college because it was the only option he had, the who got his only option taken away from him, and had to sell his books and drop his classes, knock on doors and beg for work.

That’s all he was in Ark. That’s all he’d ever be. 

So he wouldn’t go back. Not yet. He’d figure out some other place, he’d find some other job and hope that maybe he’d be some other guy when he was in some other place. Hope that it was Ark that was making him who he was, that he wouldn’t be the same greasy nobody a few towns over. 

He missed the second exit that could take him back home. 

He kept driving. 

The sky was getting darker as he just drove straight and straight and straight. He didn’t think about where he was, he didn’t bother to check a map or stop for food or pull off at all. He just drove because Ark was behind him and maybe it was fine to be nobody in a truck on the highway, but he wasn’t going to go back to being nobody in Ark. 

He didn’t even think about pulling off the highway until the gas meter started dipping dangerously low. He turned off onto the next exit without even looking at whatever town he was driving into and stopped at the nearest gas station. 

There was a diner not too far down the road from the gas station, so he parked his car and walked over to it, the warm breeze that always came in August washing over his skin until he pulled his jacket close around him. 

It wasn’t exactly the dinner he had planned. He’d been planning on stopping for a quick burrito before getting back home and making sure all the boxes were packed up, and then going to bed early. He’d never liked being in that house alone. 

There was a payphone just outside the diner. It was in the corner of his eye while he ate his burger and drank his milkshake. It was niggling at the back of his brain. He should call Octavia. She was expecting him to call when he got home. He should have been home hours ago, she was probably worried. He should call her. Let her know what was going on. 

But what the fuck was going on?

He shoved the last bit of his burger into his mouth and dropped some money on the table. Stepping outside he glanced at the payphone. His hand was in his pocket, feeling around for the few quarters he knew were jangling around in there. His thumb brushed over one, but he stepped away. 

_Tomorrow_ , he thought. _I’ll call her tomorrow. When I figure it out._

He shoved his other hand into his pocket and headed down the street back toward his truck at the station. She was probably busy, anyway. 

*** 

_Two Weeks Earlier_

Clarke heard a pounding on her door. 

“Hey, Griffin!” she heard her roommate, Anya, yell from the other side. “Turn that shit down, or I’m in there and smashing your stereo!”

She felt Raven giggle into her side.

“What?” she joked back. “I’m sorry I couldn’t hear you!” She reached over, across Raven to the desk the stereo was sitting on and turned the knob to the right, cranking the music up. Raven swatted her arm away, shifting so that one of her own arms was across Clarke’s stomach, boxing her in beneath her. 

“You know she’s going to kill you one of these days right?” Raven said. She leaned down, trailing her lips from Clarke’s neck to her collar bone. “And I mean really kill you. She totally seems the type who could finish the job.”

Clarke ignored her, leaning back into the pillow instead, and pulling Raven’s hands away from her hair and down toward her ribcage. 

Two weeks.That’s how long they had left. To fuck around, and mess around, and go out all night. Two weeks she had left to paint whatever she wanted, whoever she wanted, to blast her music as loud as she could, to sit on the couch and watch movies, or sit at the park and read books. To go out with Raven and come home with Raven. Two weeks left to actually feel her age. Then, back to school. Back to biology textbooks and labs and hours every night in the library. Two weeks. 

She closed her eyes as she heard Anya's footsteps pound back toward her room. There was another knock on the door, softer than before, but Clarke ignored it. She heard the muffled sound of Anya calling out to her from behind the door, but she couldn’t make out what she was saying. 

Raven paused, lifting away from her, sitting back on her feet. Anya knocked again. 

“Alright, alright,” Clarke said, reaching her hand out toward the stereo again. “I’m turning it down!”

The handle to her door turned and Anya stepped in, holding their phone in her hands. One hand was covering the receiver, as she held it out to Clarke. 

“Clarke,” she said. “It’s your mom. She didn’t tell me anything, but it sounds serious.”

Clarke rolled her eyes and took the phone from Anya. It was probably just her mom calling her to make sure she had everything set for her next semester. She saw Raven reach over to the side of the bed and pull a tank top on over her bra. 

“Hi, mom,” Clarke said. “What’s up?”

“Clarke, honey,” she heard her mom say. She was so quiet, and her voice was shaking. Clarke felt like she had to press the phone into her ear, hard, just to be able to hear her. “Clarke it’s your dad…”

*** 

They had a table full of casseroles. Any kind of casserole, every kind of casserole there was, they had it on their table. Clarke didn’t understand that tradition. With every ring of the doorbell, she had to pull open the door to see another one of her old neighbors, standing there, frown in place and casserole dish in hand.  
“I’m so sorry, sweetheart,” they all said. Then they’d reach a hand up to brush along her cheek, as if it helped at all. “Here you go,” they’d say, as they would hand the casserole over. “Incase your mother can’t bring herself to cook tonight. Should last a couple of days, makes good leftovers.” 

With the number of casseroles they had, Clarke was pretty sure they’d be fine for a few weeks. If they survived on casserole alone. 

But she’d nod and say thank you, and step aside, letting them wander into the living room where her mom sat with all the other neighbors who had not long before handed Clarke their own casserole. 

“Old family recipe,” some would say. “Helps a hurting heart.” 

*** 

“So,” she heard her mom’s voice come up next to her. “This is where you’ve been hiding.”

Clarke glanced up sheepishly at her mom. She was down on the ground, her back up against the washing machine, her feet tucked under herself. 

Her mom looked tired. Her hair was woven into a braid that had gotten looser and looser throughout the day, strands of wispy hair flying out from it in every direction. Her hands were clasped together in front of her, and she had great big bags under her eyes. 

“Want to hide out with me for a bit?” Clarke asked instead of explaining herself. Her mom knew her, knew that she could only last so long in a room full of people telling her over and over and over again how wonderful a person her father was, as if she’d forgotten, how lucky she was to have had him as a dad, as if she didn’t know. As if that wasn’t the reason it all hurt so much. As if the thought of never being able to see him or call him up again, of never being able to just be his daughter wasn’t what was making her lie in bed every night not able to sleep, her head aching, her body exhausted, but her mind reminding her over and over and over _he’s gone, he’s gone, he’s gone_. 

Her mom slid down next to her, her legs spread out in front of them. She watched as Abby toed off the heels on her feet, revealing red marks around her toes and heels, but Abby tucked her feet under her thighs, sitting cross-legged beside Clarke. Clarke saw her mother’s hand twitch at her side, about to reach out for her own, but she shifted and her mother rubbed her hand down her leg instead. 

“I hadn’t even thought about laundry,” her mother said after a beat of silence. 

Clarke looked over, confused. “What?”

“Doing laundry,” Abby said. “I won’t have to do it as often now. Now that there’s only half to do.”

Clarke reached her hand over and covered her’s mothers on her knee. All week they’d been thinking of little things like that. No more notes on the fridge when they got home at different times. They could use Jake’s favorite mug now. Abby could take up the whole sink with her bath products without Jake knocking them over or accidentally using her eye cream as toothpaste. 

“What are we going to do with his old clothes?” Clarke asked. “I mean, what do you do with someone’s clothes after they’ve…” She couldn’t finish the sentence. 

Her mom didn’t answer her, didn’t even look over, just squeezed her hand a little tighter. 

“I should get back out there,” she said. Abby made to stand up, but Clarke stopped her, pulling her in for a small hug. It was the first time either of them had thought to do it all day. Abby pulled back, her eyes a little brighter, but a little wetter than before. She pressed a kiss onto the top of Clarke’s head and stood up. 

“I’ll be out...soon,” Clarke said as her mom made her way through the door. If her mom could walk out and face the casserole, then so could she. 

*** 

The laundry was more than they had talked at once the whole time she’d been home. She’d gotten there and been overwhelmed by a flurry of her mom’s friends who were lovely and who meant well but who had seemed to forget that Abby losing her husband also meant that Clarke had lost her father. Then it was the day of thirty casseroles and the week of pies that followed. 

They spent a lot of the time walking around the house trying not to look at things that reminded them of Jake, but trying not to let the other one see that they were trying not to look at things that reminded them of Jake. There’d be moments where one of them would pick up his hat or one of his books, or the apron he bought Clarke as a joke and forget for just a moment, until it came back to them, and then all they’d say was a soft “oh,” before putting back where it had been sitting and remembering not to glance that way the next time they were in the room.

When the end of the two weeks came, Clarke started packing up her bags. She felt hollow, like coming home had just made things worse, but every time she thought of walking back into her apartment, of going back to school, sitting in class and the library, eating in the union, calling home between classes to just her mom, she felt like all she wanted to do was jump into her old bed and pull the covers over her. Never leave, wait for her mom to pull the covers off and tell her to get up. 

But she wouldn’t. Abby would let her stay, now, even when she’d always pushed Clarke to go for more before. So Clarke would stay under the covers, and Abby would stay there beside her. 

They couldn’t do that. So Clarke packed. 

“Maybe you shouldn’t go back to school,” Abby said, from her doorway. “Maybe it’s too soon.”

Clarke felt her eyes prickle. The whole time she’d been home, they’d barely said anything because neither of them could figure out what to say. And now when she finally could, Abby was just confusing her more. 

She wanted to stay. She wanted to hide away in this house with the feeling of him, the memory of him all around her. Where she could imagine she could hear him in his office or down the hall in his bedroom. Where she could leave the TV on when she went to grab something to eat from the kitchen and pretend she could hear him yelling at the screen. Where the sounds of cars outside could be his, pulling into the driveway. Where he was everywhere. 

But she was drowning in the house, with him almost all around. His memory was flooding it and if she stayed she’d just be staying to cling to him, his ghost, and she’d never get anything done. She’d live in those two weeks forever, and her dad wasn’t angry at her a lot in her life, but he’d be furious if she let herself waste away like that. 

“If I don’t leave now, I don’t know if I will,” Clarke said, quietly. 

Abby came up behind her and wrapped her arms around her. “Your dad would be proud of you, you know. He was proud of you. He’d be proud of whatever you did.”

Clarke reached around behind her to pull her mom close. Everything felt far away. She breathed in deep. 

“I know,” she said. “He said that all the time.” 

Her mom pulled away and wiped at a tear before it fell. 

“Well,” she said. “Okay then. If you’re ready, I can be ready too.”

“Mom, you don’t have to…” she trailed off when Abby shook her head. It was easier not to talk about it. “Maybe you could go somewhere for a while. A trip or something. Go see some friends.”

Abby just shook her head again and Clarke saw tears welling in her eyes, and she wished she hadn’t said anything at all. Abby lifted her hands as her head swayed back and forth and Clarke got it. She couldn’t leave the house. Not yet, not while he was still around. She gave her mom a small nod, and reached out to squeeze her hand. 

“I’ll drive you to the bus station. We can grab some food on the way,” she told Clarke. 

Clarke nodded, grabbing her bag. She took a look around her room to make sure she hadn’t forgotten anything and then, with the flick of the light switch followed her mom down the stairs. 

***

Her mom had waited until she watched her get on a bus before she drove away. She waited until Clarke sat down by the window and waved to her before she even got back into her car. 

Clarke rested her head against the window before they started moving and let out a breath. 

It was fine. She was going to go back to her apartment, she was going to unpack, and she was going to get ready to go back to school. It was fine. She was fine. 

Her dad would want her to be fine so she was going to be fine. 

She was fine. 

*** 

_She reached up and grabbed his sleeve, tugging him away from the man he stood talking to, toward a wall, splattered with pictures._

_“C’mon,” she whispered. She wasn’t sure why she was whispering, but the big white walls and muted suits of the men around her seemed to create a vacuum, where no sound could get in, and she was afraid that if she talked above a whisper then all the frames along the wall would shatter or the walls would crack, something, something would break, she could feel it._

_Her dad couldn’t though, she was guessing, as he let out a booming laugh behind her, letting her pull him away from the man with nothing more than a “Sorry, Steve, gotta go,” and a quick wave._

_“Pick me up,” she said when she stopped in front of the great wall, full of frames, black and white images filling it from floor to ceiling. Her dad hoisted her up, putting her on top of his shoulders with a grunt. She teetered, a bit too big to stay steady on his shoulders anymore._

_“I like that one,” she said, finger wagging in front of a few separate frames._

_“Which one?” her dad asked. He whipped his head back and forth. “Poke it, I won’t tell.”_

_Clarke leaned forward, reaching her finger out toward the frame until it touched the black corner, a smudge of oils staying behind when she pulled away._

_“That one,” she said. “It reminds me of the one you gave mom.”_

_They walked like that through the rest of the gallery, Clarke swaying unsteadily atop Jake’s shoulders, while he wandered through the halls, stopping and starting in front of different pictures, new walls filled with new images that Clarke liked but didn’t quite understand. There would be things like broken glasses on tables that her dad would stand there and study for twice as long as the photographs of bridges and lakes and she didn’t want to ask why because then her dad would know that she wasn’t thinking like he was thinking._

_So she’d rest her chin on his head, and tilt it to the side, just like he was and she’d look at all the different colors that she didn’t know existed in a black and white picture._

_“Dad,” she asked later, as they stood outside waiting for a bus. “Why do you like pictures so much?”_

_He dad paused when she asked that. He lifted her off his shoulders, and put her down on the ledge in front of him, a wall of flowers brushing her back._

_“Well,” he said, considering. “There’s not really just one reason.”_

_She plucked a flower and starting picking the petals off it, blowing them out from her palm as he explained._

_“Sometimes, there’s just a feeling you get. A sort of pressure right here,” he put his hand over her chest. “That only spreads when you find something you love.”_

_“Doesn’t that hurt?” she asked. She imagined a tightness in her chest, a pressure sitting down on her, wondering why it was what her father chased with his camera._

_“It only hurts when you’re doing the wrong thing,” he smiled at her._

*** 

The bus hit a bump and jostled Clarke awake. She felt a line of sweat gathering where her forehead met her hairline. She wiped it away with the back of her hand as she let out a breath. 

She felt her chest tighten as she looked out the window, felt like there was an anvil sitting on top of her, growing heavier and heavier, weighing her down. She pushed air out of her lungs, but it felt forced, her lungs too tight, too small for what she needed. 

It hurt. 

The bus felt smaller than it had when she first climbed on. She couldn’t think straight with everything so cramped, she needed air. She needed to get off the bus. 

She felt the bus slow down, as it pulled into a stop, and the driver yelled out something she didn’t hear, but she saw the doors open, and before she knew what she was doing, she was grabbing her bag and tumbling out the steps, onto the blacktop of the stop. 

She took a deep breath and felt the cold, fresh air wash over her skin. 

*** 

She wasn’t sure where she was. She’d wandered out of the bus stop, into the town it had dropped her in. It was a small, dingy looking place. A small little diner at one end of the road, a big red church at the other, with a gas station in between. There was a lot in front of the church, full of minivans and old white Buicks. A smattering of mom and pop shops seemed to be all along the rest of the road, each one sporting an identical “Closed” sign, everyone too busy with Sunday mass to open up shop. 

The diner looked open, a few cars pulling in and out of their lot, so she decided she could at least wander down there and grab some coffee to get herself together. 

She was passing the gas station, empty except for a dark green pick up truck and it’s owner, a young man, probably about her age, with wild dark hair, curling out in every direction. He pulled out his wallet and rifled through it. She saw him smash it shut and shove it back into his pocket, a loud curse slipping past his lips. 

His voice stopped her short, and she glanced over as he sent his foot kicking into his tire, grunting and swearing more. 

She paused, and turned. _Might as well_ , she thought. 

“Hey,” she called out as she walked toward him. 

He glanced up at her, his hard eyes looking her up and down before he grunted out a “What?”

She held her hands up in a some sort of ridiculous gesture of good faith as she came closer to him. She reached into her purse and pulled out a few bills and held them out to him. He narrowed his eyes at her hand. 

“Need some money for gas?” she said, bouncing her arm a little. He still didn’t take it. 

“I’m fine,” he grit out. Turning away from her he pulled his wallet out again and ripped it open, as if it suddenly had gotten thicker, full of money in the minute it had been sitting in his back pocket. She watched as his shoulders slumped forward as he let out an angry breath. 

He turned back to her, cheeks stained a little red, eyes cast down toward his dirty covered boots. 

“Thank you,” he said, stepping forward and taking the money from her. 

She felt a small grin tug at the corner of her mouth but she shoved it down, figuring he wouldn’t appreciate her laughing at his reluctant acceptance of help. 

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. 

She stood there, frozen in the parking lot, having no business sticking around after she’d given him the money, but having nowhere else to go. She could wander down to the diner, where she’d sit with a weak cup of coffee while she decided whether she’d get on a bus to bring her home, or get on a bus to bring her to school. 

She felt bile rise up in her throat when she thought about either option, so she stayed where she was. 

She heard the click of his tank as it was filled up with gas, and the snap of the cap back in place. She stayed silent off to the side, watching him move around his truck to her. 

He rubbed a hand over his face as he came back in front of her. “Look,” he said. She noticed how tired he looked. The bags under his eyes reminded her of her mother and she wondered how long it had been since he’d gotten a full eight hours of sleep. His eyes were a little bloodshot, too. “I can’t pay you back,” he said pulling her out of her inspection of him.

She looked up, meeting his eyes. “That’s okay.”

“I don’t have any cash on me, or else I could have filled the tank myself. I don’t have a credit card,” he carried on as if he hadn’t heard her. “I’ve got an ATM card, but the only ATM around is in this locked vestibule down the road, so I can’t get any cash. I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” she said shaking her head. 

He looked at her a moment longer, waiting for her to ask him something, but then settled on giving her a small nod and stepping one foot back toward his truck. She stayed where she was. He’d clearly been expecting her to leave after he’d finished talking. When she didn’t he froze. 

“You need something else?” He called over to her. He didn’t seem especially keen to help her out, but she could tell she was wigging him out, staying there, frozen like a statue, watching him as he walked away, watching as he stepped toward his truck, not making a move herself. She must’ve looked incredibly stupid, standing there wide eyed and silent, waiting for him to drive away and leave her there, standing alone in the parking lof of a gas station without a car. 

“No,” she mumbled shaking her head. He gave another nod and turned around fully, his back to her as he reached an arm out to pull the door open. 

“I can pay you!” she called out. She hadn’t thought about the words before they’d tumbled out, but they were there, floating between them, too late to take back. He pushed the driver’s side door closed slowly, and turned back to face her. 

“Excuse me?” he said. 

“To drive me,” she said. She cleared her throat. “If you drive me, I can pay you.”

His eyes trailed her up and down, wide and curious. Possibly a bit afraid. Definitely more than a bit confused. 

“You don’t even know where I’m going,” he pointed out. He crossed his arms and leaned his shoulder against the truck. Maybe trying to intimidate her. She took a breath. 

“Well where are you going?” 

He huffed out a laugh at that and shook his head. “I have no idea,” he admitted. “Not Ark, I can tell you that.”

“Where’s Ark?”

“Nowhere,” he said, not meeting your gaze. “It’s nowhere.”

She took a small step forward. “And you’re going...somewhere?”

This was stupid. She didn’t know why she sounded so hopeful that this stranger, this man who could be anything, a murderer or a criminal, or crazy, would nod his head and say yes he was going somewhere and yes she could come along. But standing in the middle of the nearly empty gas station parking lot she couldn’t help but feel like a lot was riding on his answer. So she held her breath as he considered her offer.

“Yeah,” he said finally. “At least, I think I’m going somewhere.”

He didn't say anything else, but he didn't move to leave either so Clarke was left standing there wondering if he was just waiting for her to say something or if he was just taking time to consider her offer. Maybe trying to gauge if she looked as crazy as she must have seemed to him.

“Look,” Clarke said. “I can give you everything I’ve got.” She pulled out her wallet. “I’ll pay for at least half the gas, I just have to leave enough for food along the way. Do we got a deal or no?”

She had been trying to put a bit of a bite into her words, make it seem like she didn’t have time to wait around for him to take all day to decide, when they both knew that wasn’t true. If it had been true, she wouldn’t have been standing there in the first place. He held all the cards. She stood waiting for his answer.

She did see slight upturn of his lips at her tone though, which she took for a good sign. Eventually he just shrugged and gestured to the passenger side door. 

“Tag along if you want,” he said, noncommittally. “I don’t really care.”

*** 

He wasn’t sure what the hell was going on. 

One minute he’d been trying to pull more than the three dollars he knew he had out of his wallet and the next he was sitting side by side in his truck with some girl he’d never met. After taking her money. And agreeing to take more. 

There must have been something wrong with her. People don’t just go up to people and offer them money. Not where he’s from. Maybe it’s different for people who have money, which judging by her clothes and her bag alone, he’s assuming must be the case. 

He rolled his eyes as he imagined Octavia’s reaction to her shoes. 

But something was definitely wrong with her because she’d spent a good five minutes standing silently in the middle of a gas station, with no car and no friends around. And then, she’d asked a complete stranger to drive her to….nowhere in particular. And then she’d actually _gotten in_ the truck when he agreed. 

She was either crazy, or running from something. He didn’t know which one was better. 

If she was running from something, then maybe it was a good thing he’d agreed. Get her away from whatever was chasing her. Do a good deed, for karma and all that. 

Unless it was the law and she was some sort of crazy criminal. Well, some sort of criminal. She seemed to have the crazy bit down. 

But, he needed the cash. He always needed the cash, honestly. It was going to be a little easier day to day now that Octavia was away at school and he would only have to worry about groceries for one and he was fine with eating leftovers most days if it meant he would only have to cook a couple times a week, but he wasn’t exactly flush at the moment. College bills, even with scholarships like Octavia’s tended not to be so friendly with bank accounts. 

And this, whatever this was, this road trip or this escape or this excuse to run away, whatever is was that he was doing was just going to be another dent in his account. He could feel the grease and oil that would cover his hands for days working at the shop to make up for it. 

So if some rich girl wanted to pay him to drive her around, he wasn’t stupid enough to say no. 

As long as she kept her feet off the dash and didn’t spill anything sticky, he could live with her sitting there quietly beside him for a few hours a day. 

The girl, Clarke he’d learned her name as soon as she slid in beside him and stuck out her hand for a handshake, didn’t seem to get the quiet thing though. 

She’d sat awkwardly at first, quiet like she’d been at the station, staring at her hands in her lap, and she looked tired but she didn’t seem to want to let herself fall asleep because every time her head dipped over to the side, she would readjust. She’d bring her legs up and cross them or she’d tuck her feet under her thighs, practically kneeling on the seat, anything to keep her moving long enough to ward sleep off indefinitely. 

“So, Bellamy,” she said, after about an hour of shifting around and silence, watching the road pass by out the window. “How old are you?”

He looked over at her, eyebrow raised. “23.”

“I’m 21,” she said, even though he didn’t ask. He didn’t have anything to say to that, so he just nodded and kept his eyes on the road. Maybe that would be enough to hold her over for a bit. He heard her open her mouth and take a breath, as if she was about to say something, and groaned internally. 

“What do you do?” she asked.

“I work.” 

_I spend twelve hours a day up to my elbows in dirt and grime and oil, making barely enough money to feed me and my sister, pay outstanding hospital bills, and then fill my own tank, which you obviously saw this morning. Oh and then put money away for my sister to go to school so she didn’t wind up stuck in Ark after having dropped out of her first semester of community college like me._ Yeah, maybe that would shut her up. 

“What do you do? For work?” She was watching him, eyes wide. She seemed genuinely curious. 

He wasn’t trying to be a dick, he really wasn’t but she wouldn’t ever get what his life was like and it was pointless to try to explain it to her. Especially when in a few days he’d never see her again. 

“I work on cars,” he clenched his jaw, waiting for some sort of judgemental comment, but she just nodded her head and leaned back in her seat. 

She was quiet only for a moment or two before she picked back up again. She was rambling, her hands flopping back and forth as she talked, and he thought that maybe she might have been nervous, but he tuned her out for the most part. Her voice stayed a constant noise in the background like a fan or the patter of rain against the window, but he had no interest in laying himself out for her to get to know better. 

His life story wasn’t exactly a fun one at the moment, and he sure as hell didn’t need some stranger, from a totally different world, giving him that look he always got from people when they learned anything about him or his family or his life. He was exhausted and his muscles were aching and he had a small constant throbbing in the front of his head, and he just wasn’t in the mood to deal with it. 

“So, you’re from Ark?” he heard her say. “What’s that like? Is your family there?”

He ground his teeth. “No.”

“Oh,” she said. “Are you going to visit them?”

“Let’s not do the whole get to know you thing, yeah?” he snapped. “We don’t have to pretend like we’re best friends or anything.” 

He glanced over at her and saw that she had turned her head to look out the window. Her cheeks were tinted pink and she was nibbling on her lip. 

“Sorry,” she mumbled. “Just trying to be friendly.”

He let out a slow breath. This was more work than he bargained for.

“I just picked you up off the side of the road, and you agreed to come without knowing where I was going. You really wanna talk about your life right now?”

She was looking at him when he said that, her eyes harder than before, colder. 

“You’re right,” she said, facing the windshield, pulling her feet up under her legs. “Let’s just drive.”

*** 

She hadn’t tried talking after that. 

She stayed facing forward, or looking out the window silently as the road slipped past beneath them. She watched to her right as they drove through town after town until he--Bellamy he’d said his name was--finally resigned himself and turned out onto the highway. She watched the towns turn to fields and trees, the engine rumbling beneath them, their seats vibrating as they went. 

She let herself glance over at him only once. He was staring straight ahead (a good habit for a driver, at least) either not noticing her attention, or ignoring it. His jaw was clenched, his mouth in a hard line, and his hands gripped the wheel so tightly that his knuckles looked white against it. 

If it had been different, she might have reached for her sketch pad. The sun filtered in through his window, soaking into his dark, tanned skin, pointing out each clump of freckles on his nose and cheeks. 

He looked beautiful and hard, with cold eyes whenever he looked at her. He clearly wanted no part in getting to know her, and yet she couldn’t make herself tell him to pull the car over for her to get out. 

She sighed, and slipped her feet out from where they had been wedged underneath her thighs. She felt all her muscles tense up and tighten, and she needed to stretch, but there was no room in the cramped seat. She lifted her legs to prop her feet up on the dash, and let out a breath of relief when she felt her muscles stretch with the movement. 

“No feet on the dash,” Bellamy grunted, scowling at her. 

She made a face at him and made a big show of pulling her feet back down to the edge of the seat, hugging her knees in front of her. 

“Any other rules?” she asked. 

He raised an eyebrow at her, gauging how serious she was being, but she just waved her hands,gesturing for him to go on. 

“So far we’ve got no feet on the dash and, apparently, no talking or friendly conversation at all.” She looked over at him. “So come on, what else you got?”

He bit his lip. “I didn’t say no talking,” he said after a moment. He even had the decency to look a little guilty about it. Clarke just scoffed at him, disbelieving. 

“Fine. How about, no questions about parents?” he amended. 

“That,” Clarke said, nodding. “Actually sounds perfect. No feet on the dash, no questions about parents.”

Bellamy drummed his fingers on the steering wheel.

“And no smacking your gum,” he said.

“I’m not even chewing gum!”

He looked over at her, a small smile playing at the corner of his lips. It changed his whole face and she let herself stare until he turned away. 

“When you get gum,” he said. “Then no smacking it.”

Clarke pulled out her sketch pad from the bag at her feet. She flipped quickly over all the pages of half finished drawings, ignoring the smudged lines, and the half finished faces that flashed at her as she searched for an empty page. There was a marker in the cupholder on the ground, so she reached down and grabbed it. She uncapped it and scribbled at the top of the page before turning and showing it to Bellamy when he shot a look her way. 

At the top of the page was the phrase “Road Rules” in big thick letters, underlined a few times, followed by their three rules. She left plenty of space for more, but she capped the marker for the time being and leaned back into her seat, stretching her legs out in front of her as far as she could. 

She left the pad open on her lap and rested her head back, letting her eyes slip closed. Her hand was itching to roll her window down and let a cool breeze wash over her, to let some air in the cramped truck, to let it relieve some of the tension stuck in the stale air between them, but she felt the rumbling of the truck flying down the highway and pulled her hand back. Unless she wanted her ears to rattle off her head, it was better to sit in suffocating silence then to let the window down. 

So she leaned back, eyes closed, and pretended she was somewhere else, with someone else. Someone who liked her. Someone she didn’t need rules with. 

But she leaned back and ignored it, and she noticed her chest didn’t hurt quite as much as before.

***

“This is stupid,” Clarke grumbled, pushing her door open. She shifted, letting her feet dangle out of the side of the truck as Bellamy wandered around from his side, to where he stood standing in front of her. His head was already drooping down onto his chest. 

“Come on,” he said, tiredly. Even his words were starting to slur. 

“I’m a good driver,” she said. “I’ve had my license for years.”

Bellamy’s face was blank. He shoved his hands in his pockets, his feet spread wide to steady him, but she could see that he was swaying back and forth where he stood. 

“You don’t have a car,” he said for the tenth time. “Having a license doesn’t mean anything if you don’t actually drive.”

Clarke huffed and jumped out of the truck. She grabbed her bag and slammed the door, throwing her hands out to gesture for him to lead the way. 

“They wouldn’t have given it to me if I was a bad driver,” she muttered under her breath as she followed him up to the check in desk. “I can drive in a straight line for a couple hours without the world crumbling around us.”

Bellamy ignored her as he stepped up to the desk. 

Clarke leaned her back up against it and stared out at the parking lot as Bellamy spoke softly with the woman behind it. The sky was getting grey, bleeding into the bleak color of the fields and the roads. It was how she imagined the world to look after a huge storm, if it had nothing but grass and road for miles, no buildings or traffic signs to cut into the sky as the clouds reached back, drifting away as the ground soaked everything up. 

It would be beautiful if she wasn’t staring at it from the broken down motel that they happened to drive by, that Bellamy assured her would be good enough, even though it’s windows were dark and had only half the shutters and the metal frame around the door was orange and rusted. 

When she’d suggested they drive a bit longer to find an actual hotel, he’d just looked her up and down like he’d done back in the parking lot of the gas station earlier that day, and scoffed. She felt her skin prickle under his gaze and she turned away from him, clamping her jaw shut. 

_Fine_. The motel would be fine. 

*** 

There were two tiny beds in the room. One was by the bathroom, one by the heater that was making some sort of unsettling clicking noise. She dropped her bag on the first. 

“I’ll take the other bed then,” Bellamy said grumpily. 

“Jesus, do you want this one?” 

Nothing, _nothing_ she did seemed to be okay with him. Her talking, her not talking, her rules, her clothes, herself. He was just looking for things to get pissed about because he thought she was an easy target. Well she wasn’t going to be one. 

“No,” he mumbled. “This one’s fine.”

“Great,” she snapped. “Then stop complaining.”

She rifled through her bag, pulling a big grey tshirt out. She pulled her sweater over her head and dropped it on the ground next to her bed before she tugged the t-shirt on. She resorted to using the old locker room trick where she stuck her arms into her shirt to undo her bra and pull it out, and she dropped that on top of her sweater. 

The heat seemed to be cranked all the way up, and the only pajama bottoms she’d packed were her flannel pants, so she left those in her bag and dropped it down, tugging her jeans over her hips and crawling into her bed and slipping under the sheet before she’d had a chance to check to see if Bellamy had been watching her or not. 

When she settled in she saw that he was facing the wall, a pile of clothes folded neatly beside his feet, while he pulled his shirt off. She turned away as he climbed onto his own bed, switching the light off as he did. 

The room seemed quieter when it was dark. That was stupid, she knew, the light didn’t make any noise at all, but suddenly the room was wide and dark and quiet and colder than it was a minute before, and she felt very, very small in her bed. She pulled the sheet up to her collar and squeezed her eyes shut. 

When her eyes were closed she felt like she wasn’t in the motel, she was back home, the stale air of the funeral home sticking to her every pore. She could feel her heels cinching in on her feet and she could hear the murmurs of the “I’m so sorry dear,”'s that came at her from all directions. She saw her feet step forward toward the casket, propped open and she saw her hands rest down on the sides of, her fathers face cold and grey below her. 

She opened her eyes. 

A shaky breath skittered past her lips and she cleared her throat, pushing it away. 

“Goodnight,” she whispered. 

She heard Bellamy shift on his own bed, but he said nothing for a long moment. When she thought that maybe he’d already fallen asleep she heard him clear his own throat. 

“Night.” 

*** 

She woke up to a muffin hitting her in the face. 

“Rise and shine,” Bellamy called to her, nibbling on his own muffin. “Skeevy guy at the front desk said we gotta be outta here in five. I’ll meet you at the truck.”

Clarke groaned, rolling into her pillow, flipping him off. 

“I hate blueberry muffins.”

She heard him huff out a laugh. 

“Be out in five, or I’m leaving without you,” he said. Then he swiped the muffin from beside her head and took a big bite. She pulled the sheet over her head and waited until she heard the door swing closed to let out another groan. 

*** 

Clarke, apparently, was not a morning person. She'd been dead asleep when he’d woken up and gone down to the front desk to check them out. She’d been dead asleep when he came back to the room and tested out the shower. (Cold, but at least he didn’t feel like he was covered in anything weird from the room.) And she’d been dead asleep when he went out to grab something to eat. She’d been dead asleep when he reached out and shook her shoulder, the only sign that she was alive was when she seemed to grip the pillow a little tighter. 

So he’d tried something else. She woke up immediately when the muffin landed on her nose. 

She came grumbling out of the room four minutes later, her hair pulled up into a bun, wearing the same clothes as the day before. She glared at him as she walked toward him, and he held up a new, chocolate chip muffin as a peace offering. 

“You sleep like a log,” he said. 

She snatched it out of his hand and ripped a chunk off the top, shoving it in her mouth. “What does that even mean?” she asked, crumbs spilling over her lips. She reached for the door. 

“Woah, there,” he said blocking her. “If you’re going to eat like that you’re going to eat outside the truck.”

She narrowed her eyes at him and made a big show of tearing off a much smaller piece, and placing it delicately in her mouth. She chewed slowly, and purposefully, actually physically turning her nose up at him, and waited for him to move his arm. He did, reluctantly, and she swung the door open and climbed in. 

“So,” she said when he slid into his own seat. “Where to?”

He drummed his fingers along the steering wheel. He had no idea. He hadn’t thought he’d even be driving this long. He hadn’t thought at all. 

“How’s west?” he said instead. She nodded and leaned back into the seat. 

“West sounds good.”

***

The quiet wasn’t as rigid as the day before. 

It wasn’t filled with the awkwardness of trying to figure him out, or the fear of saying the wrong thing or the noise of all the thoughts she wanted to push back. She let it wash over her, she let herself sit back and turn her brain off, and let the noise of Bellamy’s fingers tapping on the steering wheel fill the stale, warm air of the truck. 

When she glanced over at him from time to time, she noticed he wasn’t gripping the wheel as tight. His brows were still furrowed, a thick crease sitting just  
above his nose, but his knuckles weren’t white and his neck wasn’t stiff and stuck staring straight ahead. 

He even gave her a small smile when he caught her eye. 

When she felt herself getting antsy, she reached out to the radio dial to switch it on. She glanced over at Bellamy when he shot a look at her hand, looking away quickly without saying anything. 

“Is it okay if I turn the radio on?” she asked. 

“Yeah,” he nodded. “Yeah, go ahead.”

She turned the dial, switching back and forth between a few stations, trying to find something that wasn’t completely static, finally landing on a station playing a bit of news  
_“--and even after the IAS announced that no further IAS sponsored conferences would be held in a country that is working to restrict entry to HIV infected travellers, protests to close America to infected immigrants have continued on. Questions of whether or not infected persons should be detained until more is known about the correlation between HIV and AIDS is still being tossed out by citizens with extreme views. The dangers of the illness have--”_

Bellamy’s hand shot out from the wheel and smacked the radio off. Clarke sat up, looking over at him, startled by his movement. 

His nostrils were flared out, and she hadn’t noticed over the noise of the radio, but his breathing had gotten heavier, heaving. She opened her mouth to ask him what was wrong but he was already shaking his head. 

“Sorry,” he said. “Let’s just...can we not listen to the radio?”

Clarke nodded quickly, looking away. “Yeah,” she said. “Sure, sorry.”

“No, I…” he trailed off. “It’s fine. There’s, uh, a box of tapes in here somewhere if you want to look through those. Should be near your feet.”

Clarke bent over her legs, and patted her hand around in front of her feet. When she reached around under the seat she felt the edge of a small cardboard box, and after a bit of tugging was able to pry it free. She pulled it up onto her lap. 

“Oh my god,” she laughed as she rifled through it. “You have the music taste of an old man.”

She pulled a tape out. “Johnny Cash? Really?”

Bellamy scowled at her. “Johnny Cash is a classic. You’re just too young to understand.”

Clarke dropped the tape back into the box, laughing. “Get over yourself, grandpa,” she said. “You’re like two years older than me.”

She pulled out tape after tape, making faces at almost all of them, thinking that maybe silence would be better than sitting through Bellamy’s eclectic mix of screaming rock music and music that he was two generations too young for. Finally she pulled out one she liked. 

Without saying anything, she popped it out of it’s case and she slid it in, turning the volume up. 

Before ten seconds had passed, Bellamy was groaning at her. 

“What?” she smiled over at him. “You’re the one who has The Bangles Greatest Hits.” She held her hands up and let herself bob along to the music. She drummed her hands up and down her thighs to the beat. 

“It’s my sisters,” Bellamy grunted. He started reaching for the radio to turn it off. “And it’s garbage so--”

She smacked his hand away. 

“Uh-uh,” she said shaking her head. “Passenger gets control of the music.”

“That is absolutely not the rule!” Bellamy protested. “Driver always gets control of the music. Especially veto power. And this?” He waved at the radio. “Veto.”

She rolled her eyes and reached down into her bag, pulling out the sketch pad. She flipped open to the Road Rules page, and added a fourth. 

_Rule #4: Music choices will be alternated back and forth between passenger and driver, and the music choices will be respected, not heckled or mocked, or overpowered by the groaning of the non-music selector._

“There,” she said, reading it out loud. “That good enough for you?” 

Bellamy wrinkled his nose at the radio once more, but nodded. 

“I don’t want to hear any complaints when it’s my turn though,” he warned. “If I’m going to sit through the Bangles greatest hits, then you’re going to sit through Johnny Cash.”

Clarke mimed retching, satisfied when she heard him snort next to her. 

“Please,” she said. “Like you don’t know the words to every song.”

To her surprise, he didn’t even try to deny it. He just shrugged his shoulders. “It’s the only thing my sister would ever listen to. Once you hear something three times a day--and I mean every day--you can’t help but learn the words.”

“So you’re going to sing along, right?”

He cocked an eyebrow at her. “Absolutely not.”

“Oh come on,” she teased. “ _Won’t be feeling sorry, sorry, sorry, on the judgement day…_ ”

*** 

He didn’t actually make her listen to Johnny Cash. 

He was tempted, just to get back at her for making him listen to that tape, again, once he thought he’d finally escaped it. 

Instead he’d made her dig around until she found at the bottom of the box a mix tape his friend Miller had made him a couple years ago.  
He was surprised when he’d caught Clarke mouthing along to a few of the songs, most of them being things he’d never picture a girl like her listening to. The Bangles, absolutely. Miller’s random mix of underground rock? Not so much. 

She’d grumbled a bit at first, saying she was allowed, to balance out his complaining when it was her music choice, but he could see a hint of a smile at the corner of her mouth, so he bit his tongue and rolled his eyes and played along. 

When it was her turn again, she already had her choice picked out, so she popped his tape out and slipped hers in right away. 

\-----

_His mom was always singing, when he was little. She’d put old records on while she vacuumed or did the laundry, while she stood side by side with him at the sink, washing while he dried._

_“All your life you’ve never seen a woman, taken by the wind,” she crooned, swaying back and forth, bumping shoulders with him. “Would you stay if she promised you heaven, will you ever win?”_

_Bellamy would hum along with her, bouncing his knees up and down, because he didn’t really know how else to dance. His mom would hum along with the instruments when the vocals died down._

_When she wasn’t cleaning, she’d be in the living room, her eyes closed, swaying back and forth in her grimy apron, the music turned up as loud as it went. She called them their little concerts._

_“There’s a lot of good music out in this world, Bellamy,” she say, putting another one of her Fleetwood Mac records on. “But some just makes you soul sway, you know what I mean?”_

_He nodded then, even though he had no idea. He wasn’t sure what it felt like when his soul swayed, but he watched his mom come home after cleaning for ten hours, just to clean with him some more, and he’d see how her smile would slip onto her face as the music blared in the background, and he wanted to know what she meant._  
\-----

He reached out without thinking and popped the tape out. He dropped it into the cupholder on the door next to him. 

“Hey,” she said. “I didn’t take your pick out--”

“Just,” he sighed. He couldn’t explain it. “Not that one.”

His voice must have given something away because she closed her mouth without protesting, nodding as she silently picked out something different to play. 

A few minutes later, music floating between them, bouncing around the empty spaces between them, he cleared his throat. 

“Sorry,” he said. 

She shook her head. “It’s fine.”

***

“Look,” he said, leaning into his window to talk to her from outside of the truck. “Is there someone you should call?”

They were at a gas station again. He’d just climbed out to fill the tank again, but seeing the payphone off to the side, he’d stopped and turned back to her. 

“I’m thinking you probably should have already gotten to where you’re supposed to be, and I’m not too fond of the idea of a missing persons report going out on you, or the idea of that getting me arrested for, I don’t know, abducting you or something.”

She bit her lip. He was right. Anya was expecting her back the day before. Early in the day too. She probably wouldn’t have called her mother, not yet, but she would eventually. Especially if Raven found out she hadn’t come back yet, and then Raven would probably wrestle the address book out of Anya’s hands and call Abby herself. 

So she nodded, reluctantly and got out of the car. He watched her as she climbed slowly out, her fingers tangling in themselves, wringing nervously in front of her. She gave him a small smile, not convincing at all as she passed him and he reached an arm out to grab her wrist. 

“Do you…” he trailed off, running his hand over the back of his neck. “Do you need change or anything for the payphone?”

“No,” she shook her head, smiling at him. “I’m good. Thanks.”

***

“So you’re not dead,” Raven said when she answered the phone. 

“No, Rae, I’m not dead.” 

“Well, good fucking thing you called, because accusations were about to be thrown around, and that would not have ended well,” Raven joked. “For anyone.”

Clarke laughed, holding the receiver closer to her ear. “Please don’t try to get my roommate arrested for a murder she didn’t commit.”

She let Raven’s voice fill her mind for a few moments. She missed her. They were never anything serious, they were never going to be anything serious, but she was her best friend, and after spending two days in a car with a guy she barely knew, a guy who could barely stand her, she missed her best friend with a gnawing ache in her chest. 

“So,” Raven said. Clarke held her breath. They were finally getting to it. “Where the hell are you?”

“Doesn’t really matter,” Clarke said. “I don’t know. West. Some random gas station.”

A sigh.

“What are you doing, Clarke?”

She felt a knot inch it’s way up her throat and she had to swallow a few times before she could answer. 

“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I just, I got on that bus to go back to school, and either everything just caught up with me, or being home without him changed everything, and it just hurt. Like the bus was on me, squishing my ribs into my lungs. I don’t know. I just had to change direction. I don’t know.”

A pause. 

“Okay,” Raven said. 

“Okay?”

“I mean,” she carried on. “You’re going to call me every once in a while to check in, let me know you haven’t been murdered. If I hear from you less than every two days then I’m calling Abby and letting her do whatever she wants.”

“Okay,” Clarke said. “Seems fair.”

“Do you know where you’re going?”

Clarke glanced back over to Bellamy leaning on the truck, waiting for her. West, he’d said. Somewhere, he’d said. I have no idea, he’d said. 

“Not really,” she said.

“Okay,” Raven said again. “Don’t get murdered. I love you.”

“Love you too, Rae.”

She clicked the phone back in place and took a deep breath before turning around and heading back to the truck. Bellamy watched her carefully as she made her  
way back over to him. 

“Ready to go?” she asked. 

He nodded. “Everything good?”

“Yeah,” she said. “It’s fine. Phone’s free if you want it.”

He turned away from her, glancing at the payphone. He opened his mouth and looked like he was about to take a step forward, but then he just shook his head. 

“Alright,” he patted the hood of the truck. “Let’s go.”

***

Bellamy suggested that they just pull off at the next exit and stop in whatever town it brought them too. He didn’t want to get back in the truck and drive for hours, the tape resting next to his left leg, and Clarke’s questioning gaze when she rifled through the box or when she thought about the way he practically fled from the gas station when it was his turn to use the phone. 

He just needed to get off the highway and out of the truck and get a few more feet of space between himself and Clarke. So he’d pulled off and drove around the town until they found a small little hotel off a side road that still let them check in, even though it was so obviously past check in hours. 

“This place doesn’t look that bad,” Clarke said as she wandered into their room. 

Bellamy snorted. “Five stars compared to the last place.” 

There were two beds, and he dropped himself down onto the closest one, letting his eyes fall shut, pressing his face into the pillow. It wasn’t late, just around dinner time, but he was exhausted. He reached out to the table between the two beds for the alarm clock and one for twenty minutes. A quick nap couldn’t hurt. 

He expected to hear Clarke do the same, but all he heard was the zip of her bag being undone, and then the click of the bathroom door as she shut it behind her. Probably showering, he thought, since she didn’t get a chance that morning. 

When the alarm went off he woke up to Clarke, standing in front of the mirror, putting make up on. She was wearing different clothes than earlier that morning, a black dress, and her hair was pulled up, but wasn’t flying all over the place like it had been that morning. 

He sat up. 

“You going somewhere?”

She turned around, mascara brush in hand. “Yeah,” she said. “I don’t really feel like just sitting around.” She bit her lip nervously. "I was just going to wander down the road to that bar we passed. Get some food, have a drink, whatever.”

He nodded, throwing the blankets off himself and moving toward his own bag. He pulled a clean shirt out of it and began to peel off the one he was wearing. 

“What are you doing?” he heard her ask. 

He started buttoning up his shirt. “Going along. That okay?”

She nodded, not looking at him. “Yeah, uh, sure. Yeah, that’s fine.”

“Okay,” he said to her. “You ready?” She grabbed her purse. “Lead the way.” 

***

They grabbed food at the bar, not bothering to wait for a table. They each got a burger, and the woman who brought them their food lingered a few moments too long, waiting for acknowledgement, and having to settle for Clarke’s. 

She gave Bellamy a sideways glance. “She was waiting for you, you know.” 

“Good for her,” Bellamy said with a mouth full of food.

Clarke carried on. “You should go for it, get her number.”

“You should mind your own damn business,” he said back. 

She held her hands up in surrender and went back to her food. She finished it off in a few bites, not having realized how hungry she had been. She sat there, empty plate in front of her for a moment while Bellamy finished his own. Once he did, he sat there, silent, fingers trailing along the bar in front of him. 

“Okay,” she dragged out the word. “Well, this has been thrilling, but I’m going to wander a bit.” She dropped some money on the bar for her burger and slid herself off the stool. 

“Have fun,” he mumbled 

*** 

He wasn’t sure how long he’d been sitting at the bar, but he’d had three beers and turned down four different offers to dance when he suddenly realized that he hadn’t seen Clarke in a while. She’d slipped off earlier, dancing with some guy with floppy hair, but she’d been within his field of vision, staying in mostly the same place, ignoring him as much as he was ignoring her, but not running off. 

He took a look around and saw she was nowhere in the room. She might have run to the bathroom, but they were on the opposite side of the bar and he would’ve seen her brush past him. 

Taking one last swig of his drink, he threw a few bills on the counter and pushed back from the bar, slipping off his stool. He pushed his way through the crowd, the stench of sweat and beer overwhelming him as he slipped between couples dancing and made his way to the back, hoping to find her pressed into some corner, but she wasn’t there. 

_Fuck_ , he thought. Of course, he was the only person in the world who knew where this girl was, and now she’d actually been abducted. Perfect. 

He saw the floppy haired guy come in through the back door, a rush of wind and the sound of cheers spilling in behind him. 

“Hey,” he grabbed the guys arm before he got too far. “Is Clarke out there?”

The guy frowned, his brow furrowed. “Clarke?”  
_Jesus_ , of course he was too plastered to have any idea what was going on. 

“Yeah,” Bellamy grumbled out, annoyed. “Blonde hair, not too tall. Black dress?”

“Oh,” realization dawned on the guy’s face. “Yeah, man! She’s out back, you should come join it’s a cool scene.” He pointed toward the door he’d just come through with a jerk of his thumb and Bellamy, throwing a quick _thanks_ over his shoulder pushed his way outside. 

There was a line of people on either side of the alley, all drunk, some stoned. He stood at the door until he saw Clarke in a clump toward the rear, a group of guys in baggy pants and backwards hats all kneeling in front of her while she sat with her back pressed against the bricks, her neck dipped back and her eyes closed. She was drunk. Or stoned. Or both. Whatever, he didn’t care. At least she wasn’t kidnapped. 

He stepped around the crowd by the door and made his way back, weaving through the legs of people stretched out from either side. 

“Clarke,” he said as he got closer. “It’s getting pretty late, we should…”

He trailed off as he reached his arm out to shake her shoulder, move her until she sat up and opened her eyes. As his hand reached out to her shoulder, he glanced down toward her legs. She was squished up against one other girl, who was nearly draped across Clarke’s legs. His hand wrapped around her shoulders to push her off gently, freeing Clarke to stand, but as she caught sight of him and smiled, bending her legs to stand, his eyes trailed down to the pavement next to her hands. 

His blood ran cold as he saw two old needles, laying on the cracked cement next to her, and suddenly he didn’t care that he’d only known this girl for a couple of days, he didn’t care that she was obviously running from something, something that was probably just as horrible as what he was running from, he didn’t care that she was hurting and trying to ease the pain because all he could feel was the thrumming of his ears, like an ocean wave crashed over his head, ringing in his skull, heat creeping up his neck. 

He wrapped his hand around Clarke’s upper arm and pulled her up.

“What the fuck?” he yelled, pushing her toward the door. She shot him a slow, confused look.

“Hey, man,” one of the guys from her clump started to stand up, reach for Clarke. He’d picked up one of the needles and was pointing it haphazardly at Bellamy. “Just chill out a sec, we’re just trying to have a good time.”

Bellamy stalked up close to him, the boys head coming up only to his nose. “Stay the fuck away from me,” he snarled, knocking his hand until he heard a clatter on the cold pavement. 

“Bellamy, what--” Clarke started to slur, her brows crumpled in on themselves, but he just grabbed her arm and led her to the door they came through. 

“Time to go,” he bit out. She paused at the door. “Now.”

“Bellamy--”

_“Now.”_

He yanked the door open and walked through it, not checking to see if she was behind him, just pushing his way through the crowd until he reached the entrance to the bar. He waited outside the front door, wrapping his jacket around him tighter while he waited for him to catch up, and when she did, he stalked away again, toward their hotel, assuming she’d catch up. 

*** 

He’d been silent the whole walk back. 

She could see the hint of red creeping it’s way up his neck and the way his fists clenched at his sides as he took silent, fuming strides back to the hotel. She stayed a few feet behind him once she’d caught up, the cold air and Bellamy’s unexplained outburst sobering her. She didn’t want to be near him, not when he was like that. She didn’t want to see the anger in his eyes, or feel it as it wrapped around her arm and pulled her away from her one escape, she didn’t want to hear it in his voice. 

They’d been fine, they’d been doing fine. They certainly weren’t friends, but it wasn’t like that first day when she’d been too afraid to talk, or when he’d been uninterested and defensive when she did try. But his face in the alley when he saw her there, slumped up against the wall was hard and cold and he didn’t wait to explain what she did wrong, he’d just brought her back into the bar and turned his back on her, leaving her to trail after him, hoping that the steam blowing from his ears would be gone by the time they got back to the room.

She closed the door quietly behind her. He’d slammed the door to the bathroom shut, and she heard the faucet running. Silently, she slipped out of her dress and pulled her pajama shirt on, climbing into the bed. Her head was already pounding, and she knew it would be worse come morning, but she didn’t have any medicine for it so she just pulled her knees up and rested her forehead on them, cupping the sides of her skull with her palms. 

She heard the door to the bathroom open and Bellamy pad over to the table between the beds. She heard a clink against the table and she pried her head away from her legs. 

“Here,” he said, setting two advil down next to the glass of water. “Drink some water, and go to sleep.” 

His voice was quiet, softer than it had been outside the bar, and his eyes looked red and tired. He moved away from her, back toward the door and when she saw he was reaching for his coat to shrug it back on she called out to him. 

“Thank you,” she said. “For the advil. And for finding me, tonight. It was nice of you to come looking.”

He didn’t turn around to face her, but his shoulders slumped, a nearly imperceptible bit of the tension slipping out, but he didn’t turn back toward her, he kept his face, weary and worn, hidden facing the door. 

“I’m gonna go get some air,” he said. His voice was rough. Scratchy. “I’ll be back in a bit.”

She nodded, even though he couldn’t see her, and sank lower into her pillows. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine a few hours before when he’d been trying to hide how he hummed along to every one of the Bangles Greatest hits, but all she could see were his wide eyes in the alley and the look on his face as he pulled her up and pushed her away. 

*** 

_His mom was shaking, sweating, curled up on the cold tile of the bathroom floor and he didn’t know what to do, He brought her water and a blanket and he tried to get her to move, to bring her to her bed, but she shook her head, clinging to her knees, folding in on herself next to the toilet._

_“Come on, mom,” he said, trying to lift her himself. “Octavia is going to be home soon, come on let’s just go to your bedroom.”_

_His voice was pleading but her eyes were squeezed shut and she was already shaking her head._

_He went to get a damp wash cloth and started dabbing where her forehead met her hair, stopping the salty beads of sweat from dripping into her eyes._

_“What if I call--”_  
_“Don’t,” she cut him off._

_He let out a frustrated groan and felt tears prickle and burn in the corner of his eyes. He couldn’t do anything, she wouldn’t let him help her, she was just sitting on the ground, convulsing and she was making him sit there and watch. He felt like he needed to scream, soon, or his throat was going to rip apart._

_“Mom,” he growled. “I can’t just do nothing.”_

_She shook her head again, reaching her hand out to pat his cheek. Her palm was clammy, leaving a puddle of sweat on his cheek when she pulled away. She tried to smile for him, but her eyebrows were drawn together in pain and he felt a lump like cement form in his stomach and he had to push the nausea away._  
\-----

 _“It can’t have gone up that much,” Bellamy argued into the phone. “No, it can’t--” He rounded the corner as the voice on the other end driveled on in his ear. “Fine,” he slammed his fist against the wall. “I’ll have to call you back.”_

_He clicked the phone of, dropping it down on the table in front of him. Octavia wandered into the kitchen, pulling a soda out of the fridge._

_“What was that about?” she asked._

_His head was dropped into his hands, rubbing back and forth across his skull._

_“Mom’s meds,” he sighed. “I don’t know how we’re going to afford it.”_

_She got that look on her face, the one where she was ready to say something she’d been thinking, something they’d all been thinking, for months and she opened her mouth but he held a hand up before she could say it._

_“You’re not dropping out of school to work, O.” He shook his head, standing up and reaching for an apple behind her. “We’ve talked about this. You’re staying in school and you’re going to go to college.”_

_Octavia rolled her eyes at him. “Yeah and how are we going to get money for mom’s junkie meds and my school?”_

_“That’s not what they--” he cut himself off running a hand over his face. “I know you’re still pissed at her, but it’s not helping anything. We’re not having this conversation again.”_

_“Whatever,” she grumbled, pushing herself off the counter and walking toward the door. “Have fun at your ten hour shift.”_  
\-----

 _The doctor was an old, wrinkled man. He came toward them, his lab coat on, a chart in his hand._

_“Bellamy Blake?” He called from the front of the waiting room._

_Bellamy stood up and walked over. His hands were wringing nervously in front of him and he could feel Octavia’s eyes on him from behind._

_“Yes?” he said, walking up to the doctor. “How is she?”_

_The doctor sighed, reaching a hand out to lay on Bellamy’s forearm._

_“It’s not looking good,” he said quietly._

***

He tried to slip quietly into the room. Clarke was lying still on her bed, probably having fallen asleep shortly after he left. He didn’t bother changing, just dropped his jeans down onto the ground and climbed into the bed in his shirt and boxers. 

He’d left to clear his head but had come back with it full of memory after memory of things he didn’t want to relive, things he didn’t want to care about, things he just wanted to brush away, to forget, to have never happened in the first place. 

He felt a wet streak slide down his cheek and he batted it away with the back of his hand. 

“I’m sorry,” he heard from Clarke’s side of the room. “I don’t...I don’t know what happened--what I did--but I’m sorry.”

He squeezed his eyes shut at how small her voice sounded, and nodded into his pillow. 

***

When Clarke woke up in the morning, her mouth felt fuzzy but her head is fine. She rubbed her eyes, and saw that the bathroom door was shut, the shower running on the other side. She flopped back down on the mattress, waiting for Bellamy to come back out so she could shower. 

After only a few minutes he wandered back out of the bathroom, wet hair, wearing a t-shirt and jeans. He glanced over at her, nodding when he saw that she was awake. 

“I was thinking about going to that diner down the road for a late breakfast, if you want to come,” he said. 

She nodded. “Yeah, that sounds good.” She grabbed some clothes out of her bag. “Just give me a few minutes to shower?”

He nodded, a small smile forced into the corner of his lips, as she slipped into the bathroom and hopped into the shower, letting the hot water wash over her. 

She didn’t bother washing her hair, just let it soak in the water while she scrubbed her body down, and hopped out only a few minutes later, pulling her clothes on and stepping back into the room to see Bellamy sitting at the edge of his bed waiting for her. 

“Ready?” she said, breathlessly, pulling her shoes on. 

“Yep,” he nodded, standing. “Let’s go.”

The walk over was quiet, but not tense like the day before. Bellamy strode slowly beside her, his hands shoved loosely into his pockets, not clenched in fists, and the permanent line between his eyebrows wasn’t as deep. 

It wasn’t until they were sitting in a booth by the window that he finally broke the silence. 

“About last night--” he started, but she shook her head.

“You really don’t have to…” she waved her hand around, reaching for whatever it was she was trying to say. “It’s none of my business.”

“My mom died.” He was looking at her straight on, none of the anger from the night before, not even sadness, just blank open eyes, expecting nothing from her. “She was kind of a junkie. Got HIV from a dirty needle. That’s why I freaked out last night, not you.”

She opened her mouth to say something, but nothing came. She watched as his head dipped down, staring at the table, swallowing nervously. Suddenly the first Road Rule made sense. _No asking about parents_. 

“I didn’t,” she finally said. “Last night, those weren’t mine, they were some of the guys. They offered but I didn’t. Not my scene.”

He looked up at her. 

“It’s none of my business,” he said, repeating her. 

“No,” she smiled. “It’s not, but I’m telling you I get it. And that I’m not into that.”

He huffed out a laugh, and she saw his eyebrows quirk. 

“I’m really sorry about your mom,” she whispered. 

“I…,” he sighed, head shaking. “I don’t really want to talk about it. I just felt like I owed you an explanation.”

She nodded, taking a sip of her coffee. It was bitter but weak and she nearly gagged from it’s taste on her tongue but she desperately needed something to help her wake up so she took another sip, nose scrunching at it’s vile taste. 

“That bad?” he laughed at her. 

“Here,” she said holding her mug out to him. “You try.” 

He took it, skeptically, watching her the whole time, and she was half sure he was going to pretend to like it just to annoy her, but she saw it in his eyes when the taste finally sank in. He nearly spat it back into the cup. 

“Told you,” she sang taking the cup from him. 

“You should try plugging your nose.”

She raised an eyebrow at him.

“To help with the taste,” he explained. “You won’t taste it as much if your nose is plugged.”.

She wasn’t sure if she believed him, she thought maybe he was just teasing her,trying to make her look ridiculous, but she did it anyway. Surprisingly, he was right. 

“Huh,” she said after a big gulp. “It worked.”

He quirked his lips in a smile, and lifted his glass of juice in silent _cheers_. 

A few more minutes passed in companionable silence, but Clarke was itching to talk, to move, to do something other than sit quietly like she’d been doing the last few days. Few weeks really. Two weeks being quiet at home with her mom, days of silence in the car with Bellamy and she was drowning, the quiet air pressing in on her. She glanced over at Bellamy and saw that the crease between his eyebrows was nearly absent. 

“You have a sister?” she asked suddenly.

He looked up at her. “Yeah,” he said.”Octavia. She’s 18.”

His eyes were lighter when he said her name and Clarke couldn’t hold back her smile at that. Ridiculous really, to feel so strong a need to smile at the glimmer of happiness in man’s eyes, when she barely knew the man herself. 

“Is she in school?”

He nodded, his smile growing a bit wider, still barely visible to someone who hadn’t seen his scowl, but she could tell, it was creeping up. 

“Yeah. Just moved her in the day I picked you up, actually.”

Clarke smiled. “What’s she like?”

He shook his head laughing, and Clarke’s chest ached for someone like that in her life. Selfish, after just learning his mother died, to envy someone for something so small, when she had so many things, but his face changed completely thinking about her, and she couldn’t help but think Otavia was lucky in ways she probably didn’t even know. 

“A pain in the ass, really,” he said, his smile finally overtaking his whole face. “Hardly ever listens to me. Smart though, really really smart. A lot smarter than I ever was at her age.”

“Wow,” she said. “She sounds incredible.”

“She is,” he said earnestly. “She deserves to be somewhere better than she is. Somewhere like Harvard, but…” he trailed off shrugging. 

“Harvard is over rated anyway,” Clarke said. “Stuffy guys in sweater vests, and tweed blazers.”

Bellamy just raised an eyebrow at her, seeing through her, but letting a laugh fall out anyway. 

“Yeah,” he said. “Sure.”

She sat staring at him as he laughs, amazed that the light, happy man in front of her was the same man as the night before. She remembered when they stopped at that gas station and he had her call Raven, how he hesitated when she told him the phone was free. Probably thinking about Octavia, she realized now. She wondered why he didn’t call her. 

“It’s been a few days,” she said. “You might want to call her, make sure she’s not worried.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “You’re probably right.”

*** 

She sat on a picnic table, a few feet away from him as he stood in the payphone booth, calling Octavia. She heard the occasional murmur of _“Yeah, don’t worry I’m fine,”_ or _“that’s great, I’m glad you’re having a good time,”_ or _“I’m not really sure, but I’ll keep you posted, alright?”_ and she smiled to herself, tipping her head back, the sun soaking over her skin. She tried to tune him out, give him his time alone with Octavia like he’d given her time alone with Raven. 

She jumped when he tapped her shoulder, to let her know she was finished. 

“So,” he said, shuffling his feet a bit. “Back on the road? Or hang around here for a bit longer?”

She glanced down the road, their hotel and the bar from the night before one of the only few businesses. She remembered walking by a park, some sort of lake front beach, and an ice cream shop. Other than that, the town seemed pretty dead. 

“Let’s hang around here for a bit,” she told him. 

He nodded. “Alright, then.”

*** 

It was probably too cold for ice cream, but Clarke had insisted, so after standing in line at the ice cream stand they wandered over to the park alongside the lake and sat on a bench just in front of the water, coats pulled tight around them as they worked on their cones. 

“Who’d you call yesterday?” he asked her, finishing off his ice cream.”Was it your mom?”

Clarke had the urge to whip out the Road Rules and point to number one, but after what he told her that morning, she didn’t think she could really use that one anymore. 

“No,” she shook her head. “Raven. My friend from school.”

“You guys live together?” he asked. 

She shook her head. “No, but she would probably strangle my roommate, Anya, if she found out I hadn’t come back and Anya hadn’t told her. It’s best to keep Raven informed at all times.”

She laughed as his eyes grew wide, curious and intrigued as she told him more about Raven, how she was an engineering student who hated engineers, how she’d managed to piss off nearly every professor in her department, but still got glowing recommendations from them because she was actually the most brilliant student they’d ever had. How she tried to single handedly steal the cow statue outside their town’s dairy and use it as a lawn decoration in front of her apartment, but she only got it about halfway across town when she got caught. How she managed to talk herself out of ever getting in trouble because she either carried on until you forgot what you meant to say to her in the first place, or she somehow managed to turn it on the other person, making them think, like with the cow, that it was their fault and she was just trying to fix their mistake. 

“She sounds...intense,” he said when Clarke finished. 

“She is,” Clarke agreed. “But she’s great.”

“I think she and O would get along,” he shuddered. “Let’s hope they never meet.”

Clarke laughed and sat back, pushing her elbows up onto the top of the bench. It was getting colder as it got later, and it must have been at least dinner time. 

“I’m gonna miss her,” she said after a moment.

Bellamy looked over at her curiously. "Miss her?”

“I don’t know if I’m going back to school,” Clarke shrugged. “Everything is sort of up in the air right now.”

“Why?” he asked, disbelieving. “Why wouldn’t you go back to school?”

“I just don’t know if it’s the right thing for me right now,” Clarke said slowly. She didn’t think she would have to explain this to a guy who picked up strangers in abandoned gas station parking lots.

She heard a bitter laugh escape his lips and she couldn’t bring herself to look over at him, her cheeks burning red at the noise. 

“Of course it’s the right thing,” he said. “You get to go to school, of course it’s the right thing. Jesus, what is it with rich kids thinking that they’ll be worse off after going to college?”

Clarke bristled at that and looked over at him. He was shaking his head, eyebrows raised nearly to his hairline as if hearing that she wasn’t sure if school was the right thing was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard in his whole life. 

“Excuse me?” she said. 

He stood up in front of the bench. 

“Go to school, don’t go to school, who cares right? It’s not like it’s a big deal when you have the option to tap out whenever you want.”

“I’m not _tapping out_ \--”

“Yeah you are,” he said. “And you get to. It’s just not that easy for everyone else.”

She stood up and stepped toward him, ready to knock back whatever he hurled at her but he just put a hand up and shook his head, stepping back. 

“Whatever,” he said, turning back toward the street. “I’ll meet you back at the room. Your _taxi_ will be ready to go by morning.”

***

He shouldn’t have stormed off, he knew that. And he shouldn’t have made the jab about the taxi. She wasn’t, at least she didn’t think she was, the kind of person who thought of him like that. Just a guy there to do her dirty work. 

That’s who he’d been to everyone back home. Who he’d had to be for Octavia, even though she didn’t want it. He didn’t want to be that guy for her. 

Sitting there on that bench though, hearing her talk about school like it was forced on her, like she was being pressured into having the only thing he’d ever wanted, he couldn’t help but see dollar signs push a wall between them, with him lower, always lower and farther away than he’d felt in that diner, sipping her terrible coffee. 

He was the guy who was driving her to get away from school. Who was helping her tap out, helping her quit before she even realized what she had. 

He pictured his small pile of textbooks, still sitting in a box somewhere for that first semester, when he’d only gotten halfway through, before he’d had to quit. He’d had to quit, he didn’t have a choice. And he couldn’t stomach the idea of someone getting to go to school without struggling for it, probably a better school than he’d ever dreamed of--hell probably one of those Ivy Leagues she’d been so easy about making fun of that morning--and choosing not to. Choosing to run away instead. 

He didn’t have anything where he was running from. That was the difference between the two of them. 

***

It was dark by the time he got back to the hotel. 

Clarke was sitting on the edge of her bed, her back to the door, her feet dangling off the side, brushing the carpet below her. 

“Fun night?” she asked, but something about her voice sounded different. Off. 

He walked around to his bed, about to flop in without a word, without a fight, he didn’t want to fight, but he was stopped by the sight of her in the mirror on the opposite wall. Her eyes were wet and puffy and red, and tear streaks stained her cheeks. 

She turned her head when she saw him looking, shuffling to pull her legs up onto the bed, and climb under, like everything was normal. He stepped over to her bed and sat carefully on the edge of it. His hand twitched at his side, and he wondered whether he should reach out to comfort her or if he should just stay put. 

His indecision made the choice easy for him. 

He sat there silently for a moment, trying to think of what to say, but his mind went blank. 

“Want to talk about it?” he asked eventually. 

She swatted the tears away with the back of her hand 

“No,” she spat out. “I don’t want to talk about it, I don’t want to think about it, that’s the problem.” Her eyes squeezed shut, her forehead crinkling as she took a deep breath. “I spent two weeks at home having to think about it and talk about it and have my neighbors come over and talk to me about how great my dad was like I didn’t _know_ , and I just don’t want to think about it anymore.” Her hands were tugging at her hair as her breathing got heavier. “And then I found you and you picked me up and I managed to find something else to think about, because _jesus_ you’re a lot of work, but it’s been good, it was fine because when I’m thinking about something else I’m not thinking about him and how he’s gone, and I just need to keep busy, but then I just came back here alone and everything was open and empty and I couldn’t keep busy anymore…” 

She was talking fast, like she wasn’t thinking about anything before she was saying it and it was terrifying to think that this was what was going on in her head all the time and he wanted to help, to slow it down and distract her but her didn’t know how. 

He shifted so he was kneeling next to her and he reached his hands out to hers, tugging her hands out of her hair gently, guiding them back down to the mattress and then reaching one back up to her arm, and resting it there, rubbing small circles against her sleeve. 

Her breathing slowed down, back to a normal pace and she opened her eyes to look at him properly, and he saw how red and raw they were. 

“I don’t want to think about it anymore,” she whispered. 

He nodded, because he understood. He wanted her to know he understood. He kept his arm where it was, and brought his other up to brush the sticky hair off of her forehead. He nodded. 

She watched him, trailed the movement of his head bobbing up and down with her eyes and then suddenly she was leaning forward, the heat of her body pressing into his and the soft flesh of her lips pushing against his own. She was gripping his shirt and moving herself closer and he couldn’t think anymore, until he pulled away.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

She looked down at their legs, pushed up against each other at awkward angles and bit her lip. 

“Keeping busy,” she mumbled. “Thinking about something else.”

He felt the heat of her palms still on his chest and he pressed into her, and put his hands on her ribs, slipping them under her shirt. 

He nodded. “Okay.”

***

She couldn’t think about anything when he was touching her. Not about anything other than him touching her. 

His lips had trailed their way over her neck, her chest, her stomach, and his hands mirrored their movement, moving in opposite directions, making sure she was buzzing and alive and preoccupied on every part of her she could touch. 

It was when he was gone that it all came flooding back. 

He didn’t linger. There, wonderfully, completely there one moment, and then gone the next, leaving her body feeling light but her head suddenly heavier than a pile of bricks, and she tried to hide how hard it was to breathe. 

Her head ached with a million thoughts as he pulled his shirt on, and a pair of sweatpants. He padded over to the door and slipped his shoes on. 

“I’m going to go for a walk,” he mumbled without looking at her. “I just...I’ll be right back.” 

He closed the door and she bit down on her lip, shoving her face into the pillow.


	2. Chapter 2

_She was the pushy one first. She was the one who grabbed him. Who kissed him. Who ran her hands up and down his chest until he was shivering. The one who leaned back onto the pillows and dragged him on top of her once he’d nodded, once he’d said okay, he’d follow her lead, he’d let her press them together to keep busy, to keep her thinking about something else_. 

_But when her hands went to play with his belt suddenly they were shaking and hesitant, looking for an out maybe, or just looking for encouragement_.

_“I can do this,” he mumbled into her neck. His hand had wound its way into the hair at the base of her neck, and his thumb annoyingly persisted on rubbing circles into the soft skin there. “If it’s what you need. To keep busy. I can help.”_

_He didn’t know what he was offering, not really. Didn’t know if he was signing on to a one night stand or a series of fucks in motels along the highway for the rest of however long they were together. Stopping and pulling off the road whenever one of them let their mind rest for too long, whenever they let the silence loom too loud or the space between them widen too much, just enough for their own thoughts to slip back in_. 

_Didn’t know if he was a one time only pain killer, washed down before bed, or if he was her new prescription, used again and again until the bad side effects started to outweigh the good ones_. 

_He had no idea, but he’d offered and she’d nodded and her hands had moved back to his belt, slipping it off his pants and then they were fumbling sloppily against one another, her hands moving too fast for him to feel anything until he pressed his lips onto her core and she stilled beneath him, her hands burning where they gripped his back_. 

***

His walk lasted until the parking lot where he slumped down against the side of his truck, running his hands through his hair and then shaking his arms out until there was feeling back in them. 

Stupid. 

He was so, so stupid. 

He didn’t even want to think about how stupid he was. He wanted to clear it all away, to block out the whole night, starting from when he stormed away from her on the bench. He didn’t even want to just forget it it, he wanted to erase it, to make it so it never happened. He wanted to crawl into the driver’s seat of his truck and turn the car out of the parking lot and back onto the road, like he’d never been there to begin with, like he didn’t have someone waiting to get on the road with him, like he’d just dropped Octavia off at school and was driving back to Ark. 

His arms still felt cold from when he slipped off of her. His hands were still shaking. 

He’d never felt more like his mother in his life and the weight of that realization crashed into him, knocking the breath out of his lungs before he’d even pulled his sneakers on and fled from the room. She would have done something like that. She would have made a stupid decision without thinking about it, without thinking about how it would play out in the long run, without thinking of how she’d feel the next day, or the next hour, the next minute. Aurora thought in the moment, never beyond. She’d look at someone sad and suffering and she’d want to help and Bellamy never thought he’d had her compassion but he realized then, that he had it, a part of it, dangerously mixed in with her recklessness and he was absolutely his mother’s son.

He didn’t want to be. He didn’t want to do that, to be that guy. But that’s all he’d done. Ever since he’d dropped Octavia off at school he’d stopped thinking. He’d given himself a break he didn’t deserve and he started acting stupid and reckless. 

He’d picked up a girl he didn’t know in a dead end town he’d never been to, only to drive her around without asking questions. He’d offered himself up to drive her, to distract her, to let her use him until she started to feel better without thinking what it meant for him, and now he was standing in a cold parking lot, slumped against his truck, no better off than he’d been when he was in Ark. 

He wasn’t going to do it anymore. He’d drive her, and that was fine, but he didn’t drive hours in the opposite direction of home with somebody he didn’t know to be the same as he’d been in a dead beat town with a family to take care of. 

Octavia had been right. He had to get out of Ark. So he did. But that wasn’t enough. He had to scrape every last bit of the guy he had to be in Ark out of his head, and throw him away. That guy was the kind of guy who would sleep with a girl he barely knew so that neither of them had to feel anything anymore.

That wasn’t the guy he wanted to be any more. 

He was supposed to be better. He was going to be better. That’s what he was going to do. He wasn’t going to be that guy any more. 

He slipped back into the hotel room and climbed into his own bed, instead of back in with Clarke. He didn’t look to see if she was asleep yet, but even with the time he’d spent outside, yanking open the door to his truck and slamming it closed again and again before finally slinking back into the room, he had a feeling she was still awake. 

He rolled over, his back to her bed, and pulled the covers over his head. 

*** 

Clarke woke up before him. 

She’d barely slept at all, but the sun was streaming in through the window and the blankets felt hot and itchy over her, so she threw them off and grabbed some clothes before slipping into the bathroom to take a shower. She didn’t glance over at Bellamy as she passed his bed, but she tiptoed alongside it just to make sure she didn’t wake him up. 

That was something she was okay with putting off for a while. 

The water of the shower was cool, but it felt good rushing over her skin waking her up, pushing out the heated flush of her embarrassment from the night before. She stood, letting it soak her skin for a few minutes before she even opened the little bottle of shampoo sitting on the edge of the bathtub. 

She had a mark on her hip, a big purple bruise from where he’d been and she squeezed the soap onto it as if that would make it go away, rubbing it in with one finger, watching the pink of the soap swirl around the purple and red blotch of the bruise. 

It was a mistake, obviously. She’d figured that much out almost immediately.

Right when he’d slipped out of her and off of her and off the bed. Right when he’d started yanking his pants up and tugging his shirt on, fumbling over to the door to pull his shoes on without tying them before running from the room completely. 

It was stupid, and she was stupid for having tried it. 

She tilted her head back and tried to focus on the cold water washing over her face instead of the memory of how he felt, of how it had worked and she’d thought of nothing but him, because that didn’t matter. They didn’t even know each other. Not really. They certainly didn’t like each other.

Well. He certainly didn’t like her. He’d made that pretty clear. 

She scrubbed her head, working the suds into her scalp and she decided she’d forget about it. That’s what he probably wanted anyway. They could do that. They could forget it and they could go back to being quiet, occasionally hostile (but occasionally friendly) driving partners. That’s what they were and that’s all they had to be and it was fine. 

*** 

He was gone when she got back into the room, but there was a pamphlet on her pillow, with the hours of the hotel’s complimentary breakfast written in big yellow letters, so she figured that’s where he went. She took her time, hoping that maybe he’d be finishing up by the time she got down there and they wouldn’t have to spend a whole meal in silence.

She was fine with going back to how they were, but she wasn’t about to pretend like it wouldn’t be awkward. 

When she finally did get down to the dining room he was sitting alone at a table in the corner, a newspaper folded out in front of him, a nearly empty plate with just a few scattered bits of waffle and a mostly full cup of coffee sitting on the table. At her footsteps he looked up at her, eyes wide. He opened his mouth to say something, maybe just _good morning_ or _have a seat_ or maybe _I can't bear to think of our horrible not-even-drunken mistake from last night and I'm going to have to ask you to find your own way home_ , but before he could get a word out she plopped down across from him and beat him to it. 

"San Francisco," she blurted out. He closed his mouth and raised his eyebrows at her. 

"Um," he said slowly. "What?"

"San Francisco," she said again. She swallowed and started again. "I want to go to San Francisco. Since we don't have a plan anyway." 

She could see the wheels turning in his head as he considered her offer. She had a brief flash of fear that he wouldn't just say no, but that he'd tell her that he didn't even want to drive her any more, that he couldn't even bear to be near her anymore, that not only would they not go to San Francisco, but she wouldn't even be climbing back into the beat up truck unless it was for a short ride to the nearest train station so he could drop her off and never see her again. 

It wasn't a ridiculous thought, that he would want to cut ties. What was ridiculous was how tight her chest got when she thought about it. She barely knew the man, it shouldn't matter what he thought of her or how long he wanted her to tag along with him. But the thought of him shaking his head and sending her off was suddenly weighing down on her, prickling at her, between her lungs and her rib cage.

She didn't want to leave. She didn't want him to send her away. She didn't want to meet his eyes and see the pity or the regret or whatever it was that was there, she just wanted to slip back into the passenger’s seat next to him and drive until they were too tired to keep their eyes open on the road. 

Maybe he didn't like her. But she didn't want to leave him yet. 

“Okay,” he said nodding. He looked back down at his newspaper and started reading.

She wasn’t sure if he was kidding. A small part of her really, really thought he was kidding. 

“Okay?” she asked, pulling the newspaper down from in front of him. “Just like that?”

“Is there some other way I should have agreed with you?”

She slumped back in her chair. He was mocking her. 

“I didn’t expect you to agree with me at all,” she huffed. “You didn’t even ask why. You barely even thought about it. I expected you to argue with me.”

“Why?” He leaned forward, his brow furrowing, but there seemed to be a playful air about him. Teasing.

“Because all you do is argue with me,” she said. 

“No,” Bellamy shook his head. “Why San Francisco?”

“I don’t know,” she said. She didn’t. She had no idea where that came from. But she thought back to her stuffy school and her cramped apartment, and the weather that she was used to with the wind and the snow and California suddenly seemed like a good option. 

“It’s in California, so you’ll get that real, full, cross country road trip thing if that’s what you’re looking for. Can’t go any farther west than California,” she babbled on. “It’s, uh, a pretty big city so there’s probably plenty to do there. Full House takes place there--”

“Really?” Bellamy laughed. “Full House takes place there? That’s what’s supposed to convince me?”

Her cheeks burned hot with embarrassment. Perfect. Now she was the girl who cried until she slept with him, and the girl who used family friendly sitcoms to justify cross country road trips. 

“I don’t know,” she snapped. “I figured I’d tailor my reasons to your argument, but you didn’t argue!”

He was watching her curiously, probably wondering why she was taking his teasing so seriously. But she couldn’t help it. She’d been nervous that morning, anxious in the shower about how he’d react to her, frightened that he’d turn her away. But he wasn’t turning her away, he wasn’t shutting her out like he had last night. He was laughing at her. And he was under her skin. 

He leaned back in his chair. “Do you want me to argue?” he offered.

She sighed. “No,” she said. “But I don’t want you to go along with it if you don’t want to.”

She saw a blush creep into his cheeks and he looked down at his lap when she spoke. She stared directly at his coffee mug, not looking at him, not checking to see if he knew that she wasn’t just talking about California or some stupid destination to the most disastrous road trip in history, and she figured from his squirming that the double meaning of her words was more than obvious to him. 

She also figured that knowing him, the little she did know of him, that that would be the closest they got to talking about it. Ever. 

“San Francisco sounds fine,” he said, finally meeting her eye. “It sounds good. We can stop and see Danny, Jesse and Joey.”

Clarke dropped her head onto the table. With a laugh, Bellamy pushed his chair back and stood up. As he moved past her chair, his hand rested on her shoulder for a brief second and she nearly jumped out of her skin at the contact. 

He seemed to be debating with himself on what he really wanted to say to her and after a moment of her staring expectantly up at him, he took his hand from off her shoulder and ran it through his hair. 

“Meet you back at the room?” he finally settled on. 

With him so close, she could see how tired he really was. Bags under his eyes as if he only slept five minutes the whole night, and his shirt was wrinkled and buttoned haphazardly. She wanted to reach out and smooth the line between his brows, but she knew that she couldn’t, that she shouldn’t, that even if he wanted her to, she’d decided that she wasn’t going to do stuff like that, wasn’t going to think stuff like that around him anymore. 

So she nodded. 

“Yeah,” she said. “Meet you there in a few.”

*** 

Bellamy wouldn’t admit that he was tired. 

When she’d finished her breakfast, Clarke went back to the room, not bothering to be quiet about it, because from the looks of the dining room, everyone in the dinky hotel had already woken up. So when she let the door slam behind her, she didn’t expect it to bother anyone. At the noise however, Bellamy snorted, jolting into an upright position, his forearm wiping across his mouth as he looked around. 

“No need to slam the door,” he grumbled.

Clarke scoffed, picking up her bag and throwing her few remaining things into it. “You were up here alone for less than ten minutes. How did you even manage to fall asleep in that time?”

“Must be my superpower,” Bellamy shrugged. 

“Alright, Nap Man,” Clarke held out her hands. “Keys please.”

Bellamy didn’t answer her. He didn’t even move. For half a moment, Clarke actually thought he’d fallen back asleep, standing up, with his eyes open. But he blinked and his brow furrowed a fraction, and he stood there, staring at her. She had to resist the urge to squirm. 

“What?” she snapped when after half a minute he still didn’t say anything.

“We’ve been over this.”

His bag was on his bed, ready to go, so he wandered over to it and slung it over his shoulder. “You don’t know how to drive.”

“I think my license would say differently,” Clarke said. She stalked over to him, reaching for his bag, going straight for the pocket where she knew he tucked his keys. Being a head taller than her, all Bellamy had to do was lift his bag over his head, and she was on her toes reaching for it while he stood and smirked down at her.

“I told you,” he said, his hand on her shoulder moving her aside. “A license doesn’t actually mean anything if you don’t actually drive.”

Clarke dropped down from her toes and gave Bellamy a solid shove, before turning and grabbing her own bag. She kept muttering under her breath as she made her way over to the door and walked out and down without even bothering to check if he was following her. 

When she got down to the parking lot, she slumped down against the driver’s side door, crossed her arms and waited. 

“Move out of the way, Clarke,” Bellamy said tiredly when he made his way over to her. 

“I’m not sure what’s on your list of ideas for this little cross country trip we’re about to embark on,” Clarke said. “But dying in a fiery car wreck is not part of my plan.”

She held her hand out expectantly. 

“Thought you didn’t have a plan,” he quipped. 

“Look at you,” she gestured up and down his body. Her eyes trailed along, following her hand for a moment before she felt a blush creep up her face and shook it off, focusing her attention back to what she was saying. “You’re dead on your feet. You barely slept last night, you’ve got bags under your eyes the size of this truck. Either you give me the keys or you go right back up to the room because you’re not driving us.”

He ground his teeth for a moment, standing there staring at her. Clarke really thought that he was just going to turn around and go back into the hotel--thought that maybe he thought that too from the warring look on his face. But eventually he let out a short puff of a sigh and shoved the keys in her hand. 

"Thank you," she said with a smile, just to piss him off. 

"This isn't going to become a habit," he said marching himself over to the passenger side door. Before he opened it he pointed at her. "Trial basis only. If I don't like your driving, I get to take the keys back, no explanation needed." 

Clarke rolled her eyes and yanked the door open. _Of course_ , she thought. _Because why would anyone ever want an explanation_. 

***

Things felt different on the passenger side of the front seat. 

He felt awkward and stiff, and like the veins in his neck were about to pop because he’d been straining it so hard, focusing on the grey and yellow ribbon disappear below  
the wheels, refusing to look over at her. 

And he wasn’t quite sure what to do with his hands. The just sat folded in his lap which felt like an oddly formal position for someone who was supposed to be calmly, blissfully, running away from every responsibility in his life. 

Maybe he shouldn’t think about that. 

He could feel her glancing over at him though. Every few minutes, she’d cock her head, pretending to look out of his side mirror, she’d let her gaze linger for a few moments before he’d clear his throat and she’d shift her eyes to the rear view mirror. He pretended he didn’t notice. Well, he didn’t say anything. The blush working its way up his neck might have indicated otherwise. 

He thought about turning on the radio just to cut through the awkward silence reverberating throughout the truck, but he didn’t want her to think he was avoiding her. A ridiculous thought, he knew, since you could hardly avoid someone less than three feet from you, but it said something, didn’t it? Flipping a switch to drown out the possibility of someone else’s voice. To use one sense to make a wall, blocking out the others. 

His hand was fiddling above his lap, deciding whether or not to flip it on, but he pulled it back when she looked out his window at the mirror again. They could sit in silence. It would be fine. 

“You should take a nap or something,” her voice startled him out of his thoughts. “You look like death, and we should be fine on gas for a couple hours so we won’t have to stop anytime soon.”

He must have looked skeptical because she rolled her eyes, tearing her gaze away from him and back on the road. 

“If you sleep now, I’ll let you drive after we stop,” she bargained. 

It was tempting. There was no reason for him not to trust her driving the truck. Except for the fact that she was a stranger he knew nothing about, that he picked up at a gas station, but that hadn’t stopped him from letting her tag along or sharing a hotel room with her so it shouldn’t really stop him from letting her drive either. 

And he was bone tired. He’d done more pacing than sleeping the night before. 

“Alright,” he said, and he could see her glance over at him, probably in shock that he agreed so easily, out of the corner of his eye. “But don’t wait until the last second to put more gas in, I don’t want to have to--”

“Yeah thanks, I’ve driven a car before actually,” she snapped. 

He just shrugged, and slid down in his seat a little, resting his head just next to the window and let the hum of the engine lull him to sleep. 

*** 

_Her nails were rough digging into his skin and he couldn’t help but push back, harder harder harder_. 

_She wasn’t looking at him, had had her eyes closed the entire time, but her hands had roamed and touched and scraped across every inch they could reach_.

_It was probably a bad idea._

_It was probably a terrible idea, but her mouth went to the crease between his chin and his neck and he could feel the streak of her tears press into his skin and he thought that sometimes maybe what you need in the moment is a terrible idea. The worst idea, but that doesn’t mean you need it any less_. 

_Her mouth on his skin convinced him of it more and more with every press, that it was wrong and they’d need to forget it in the morning, but the sun wasn’t up so they didn’t have to deal with it yet_. 

_Just for a little while longer he could pretend. She could let him, and he could let her, and they could feel something other than whatever it was they were running from_. 

_“Bellamy,” she breathed, into his skin, “Bellamy.”_

***

He startled awake. 

His head dipped down and bumped into where the window met the door and breath whooshed softly and swiftly out of his lungs. Squeezing his eyes shut he rolled to the side, and pressed the back of his head into the stiff cushion behind his neck, letting a little groan escape him before slumping back down. He let his eyes open lazily, barely cracked at all, watching the light stream in through the windshield.

He felt groggy, like a fog was resting over his head and for a second he thought he might still have been dreaming but then he realized that he was in his truck, slouched over in the passenger seat which must have meant he had been sleeping. And someone else was driving. Hopefully. 

Through the fog he heard soft humming, trickling over from the driver’s side of the truck. 

He rolled his head and peeled his eyes open all the way. Clarke was humming, a few lines slipping out, ahead of the beat a little bit, and a little off key, but it was quiet, not wanting to wake him. She had a look of concentration on her face, staring intently at the road, with a small smile creeping at the corner of her mouth. 

_“I’ve been afraid of changing,_ ” she sang along, “ _cause I built my life around you._ ”

Her voice was nearly a whisper, raspy but thick. Pleasant. It surprised him, and maybe it was the exhaustion wrapping around him but he found himself watching her, and listening to her as the song ended and carried on into the next one on the tape, wanting her to keep going. 

After a minute, he shifted, stretching his hands out in front of him a bit to pull the knot out of his back. She caught the movement out of the corner of her eye and jumped in her seat.

Her hand shot out, ejecting the tape from the player.

“Sorry,” she said, her neck burning bright red. “Didn’t realize you were awake.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “You can keep playing it if you want. Really,” he added at her doubtful look.

“It’s fine,” she said, waving her hand around nonsensically. “You don’t have to--it’s fine.”

She didn’t look over at him, just stared straight ahead at the road. He watched as her hands tensed around the steering wheel and wondered how long she was going to avoid looking over at him.

“Look,” he said reaching out for the tape and popping it back into the player. “I didn’t have to be such a dick about it before, I’m sorry. You can listen to whatever.”  
She nodded, still not looking at him.

“Okay,” she said after a minute. “Thanks.” 

He nodded and turned the volume dial up a bit.

She still didn’t look over but he caught her smile out of the corner of his eye. 

*** 

“It was my mom’s favorite band,” he said when the tape ended. He pulled the box onto his lap to busy himself while he spoke. “Fleetwood Mac. She used to sing it to me all the time. That’s why I--before, that’s why.” 

He tucked the cassette back into its case and slipped it back in the box. His fingers skimmed over the top of the tapes tracing over the lettering 

“Oh,” she said, startled. She glanced over quickly without meeting his eye and then turned back toward the road. “You don’t have to…” She trailed off and he shrugged. 

“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”

She let silence lag between them for a moment, nodding minutely, to herself or to him maybe, probably just for something to do so she couldn’t feel the silence press over them. 

“So,” she said. “Your turn?” 

He pulled out a tape in a bright red case, big black block letter on the front. A gift from his friend Miller. 

“Yeah,” he said. “My turn.”

***

“No way,” she said an hour later. “Absolutely not. I mean it!” Clarke reached out a hand to swat his away from the stereo. Smacking it she knocked the tape out of his hand. “We are not listening to that again, it’s my turn.”

“C’mon,” he pleaded, a smile plastered on his face. “You have to admit that was fun.”

“ _So_ fun,” she said. “So much fun I don’t think my ears will ever recover. In fact, I think that if that was fun, then I’m set on fun for the month. No, for the _year_.”

“Hey,” he said, bringing his hand up to his chest, wounded. “My best friend Miller made that one for me--”

“Your best friend Miller is cracked,” she said, raising an eyebrow at him. “Or deaf.”

He picked the tape up off the floor by his feet and twirled it around between his fingers, flicking it on and on in circles. He opened his mouth to say something--to goad her or beg or tease her again but she held up a hand. 

“Rule number four!” she shouted. 

He pouted but slipped the tape back into the box, hands going up in surrender. 

“Fine, your highness. Tell me, what do you want to listen to?”

***

The rest of the drive was weird.

It wasn’t terrible, and the truck wasn’t dripping with the horribly awkward tension that had been seeping in from every crack on every window and every door of the car. It was actually...pleasant. Which was the weird part. It wasn’t a strain, sitting in the passenger seat while Clarke drove, popping tapes in every now and again, watching her sing along to the songs she knew, watching her wrinkle her nose at any song she didn’t like, her head bobbing along anyway like she couldn’t help it. 

She was in charge of driving, her eyes out so he could slouch back in his seat and relax. He was in charge of the music and the map. She’d dug a big map out of the pocket on her door, one she’d grabbed from the front desk of the hotel, thrown it at him and said if he was going to play another one of Miller’s mixtapes, he was at least going to be useful.

They’d stopped for gas already and when she walked around to the passenger side door, he’d pretended to be busy flipping through tapes, picking out the next one, and staring at the map, figuring out where they were going. He pretended to ignore her eyebrow raise when she walked back over to the driver’s side and jumped in. 

“Okay,” she’d said, slowly. “Ready then?”

He’d nodded and she’d pulled back onto the highway. 

They still weren’t talking much, but it wasn’t the heavy silence from before. When conversation dropped off he didn’t feel like there was something missing, he didn’t feel forced to think about why they might not be talking. 

It was better. Easier. 

A few hours in the car watching someone sing along to every crappy mixtape you have could do that, he guessed. 

Not that the thoughts were completely gone. Sometimes there’d be a little too long between each track, and the crackling of the tape would get a little too harsh, make his hair stand up and suddenly he’d wonder if she wanted to drive so she’d have an excuse to watch the road instead of him. It was stupid and he was almost definitely overthinking it. _No_ , he’d tell himself. _She wanted to drive because you looked like a zombie because sleeping with her freaked you out so much you decided to become an insomniac_. 

It was those moments when he thought she must know exactly what he was thinking, and that’s why she was staying quiet. Wondering what she was still doing in his crappy pick up truck, driving with a stranger to god knows where. 

But then she’d pick up on the first few notes of a song playing and hum along, looking over at him, exaggerating every note, louder and louder until he started humming too, and he’d forget for a second exactly how weird their situation was. 

“Yo, navigator,” she said, snapping her fingers in front of him, pulling him out of his thoughts. His head jerked away from the window, tilting toward her. “You keeping track of where we’re going?”

“Yeah,” he said rolling his eyes. “This road is what we call the highway. We’re going to be going straight for a while longer.”

She stuck her tongue out at him, just as the static started again. “Thanks, smartass. Helpful.”

But she relaxed back into her seat and twisted the knob of the volume up just a bit more. 

A few more minutes passed before she spoke again. 

“Hey what did that sign say?” she asked.

“Which one?” His head popped up.

Her eyes squinted, trying to see the one up farther ahead. “I think it said something about a lake. Can you read that?”

He narrowed his eyes, leaning forward. 

“Yeah, next exit.”

She raised her eyebrows at him. “What do you think? Take a little break? Relax for few minutes?”

“I am relaxed. I’ve been relaxed this whole time.”

She flicked the blinker on, signaling herself into the lane to her right, exiting where the sign for the lake was pointing. 

“Okay well, you’ve just been sitting there. I’m tired.”

“Yeah, pressing that gas pedal is real straining, isn’t it?” He smirked over at her, but softened his smile when she glared at him. “The lake sounds nice.”

She pulled off the road slowly, meandering her way onto a smaller dirt road which crunched under the tires. There was no one by the water when they pulled up, no one in the parking lot either. A wide stretch of dirt with scattered patches of grass spread in front of the water, one small picnic table off to the side by a line of trees. 

Clarke pulled up next to the table and shut the engine off. She swung her door open and hopped out, her boots making a heavy thud when they hit the ground. She walked around to the back and fished around in her bag for a while. 

Bellamy, glancing back at her when he stepped outside, moved to sit on the table, feet resting on the bench, looking out on the water. 

Some kid had left a small red buck off by the water. A few piles of dirt were stuck up beside it, sticks poking out of the top of them, and Bellamy let a rough chuckle tumble from his lips. 

Clarke pulled herself onto the table next to him, a pad in her lap and a pencil stuck behind her ear. When she settled, she flipped quickly to the first blank page, not stopping on any of the others, not lingering as she flipped, and certainly not giving Bellamy enough time to look at any of them. 

She faced out toward the water and, licking the corner of her bottom lip, she stroked the tip of the pencil against the page, slowly at first, carefully, and then a few minutes passed and her movements were quicker and more determined but less cautious. 

He mostly just watched, a little transfixed by the movement of her hands. 

He hadn’t had many artsy friends back home, certainly hadn’t had time for something like that himself so it was a little surreal watching the view in front of him appear onto the page on her lap, as if that was a real thing people just _did_. 

“So you draw,” he said, which _duh_. 

She nodded without looking away from the page. “Yeah,” she said. “Since I was little.”

It seemed like that was the end of the conversation so he let it drop, watching her movements closely again, trying to remember something he’d been doing since he was little. Besides watching over Octavia. 

He couldn’t come up with anything.

“My dad was a photographer,” she said. Her movements had slowed down again, fixing little things, focusing on tiny little details on the page. “He’d always bring his camera with him wherever he went. Tried to teach me too, but for some reason I could just never get it. I’d see something great in front of me but I could never make the camera see it. He’d take me with him, on hikes and things whenever he wanted to go out and get a few shots.”

She swept the back of her hand across the page, smudging it a bit and he wondered if that was what she wanted, or if was just an impulse, a habit that was hard to break. 

“He’d give me his pictures though,” Clarke continued on. “That’s how I got started drawing. I’d try to mimic them.” She leaned back and flipped through the earlier pages of her sketchbook, slower this time, taking a few seconds on each drawing. “He couldn’t draw to save his life so it was our little trade.”

She sighed and flipped the sketchbook closed. 

“Drawn them all about a hundred times now. Need some fresh material.” 

He didn’t know what to say to that. Too much, he thought, it was too much. Too much sharing for two people who didn’t know each other. Too much now that he knew he dad was dead and that he was helping her run from whatever reality that brought her into. Too much to say to someone who never had a dad or even just a parent to have something like that with. No little trades with his mom. Not between them. Nothing like that even with Octavia. 

So he swallowed the lump in his throat and said, “Looks like you found some.”

“Yeah,” she croaked, looking over at him from the corner of her eye. 

His stomach growled, loudly, and he suddenly realized how hungry he was. They hadn’t eaten anything since leaving, just gotten in the car and drove. 

“Hey,” he cleared his throat. “You hungry?”

She looked up at him and nodded, moving to get off the bench and put her sketch pad away, but he waved her away. 

“You keep sketching, I think I saw a sandwich shop down the road,” he said. “I’ll go grab us something and come back here.” She looked like she was about to protest but he shook his head. “Seriously don’t worry about it, you’ve been driving all day. It’ll just take a few minutes.”

***

A little trade.

That’s what she’d called it, as if that’s all it was. 

Bellamy’s hands tightened on the steering wheel as he tried to regulate his breathing. It was nothing, nothing to get this upset over, but suddenly his lungs felt like they couldn’t hold any oxygen unless he took big, fat, rapid gulps. 

He thought of his mom and how the only little trades they had were ones of secrets and guilt. She’d pile them on, the secrets the shame, the addictions, the vices, and he’d keep them away from Octavia. 

All the while Clarke’s dad was handing her newly developed pictures and she was slipping him little sketches.

And somehow the two of them were running at the same time, toward the same place, and none of it made any sense because two people who had everything so different couldn’t possibly be heading for the same place. She, who had everything and then felt like it was all taken away from her, couldn’t possibly be going the same way as him. A hopeless case who felt an insane sort of guilt ridden freedom when he thought about his empty house back home; who’d had nothing and was crippled by the fear that he didn’t have any excuses anymore, but that he’d always still have nothing because that’s who he was.

Little trades. 

He didn’t realize how fast he’d been going, he was nearly to the shop when he saw the speedometer. He pressed on the brake to slow down, trying to slow his breathing at the same, but a tire got caught on something and the nose of the truck twisted to the side. 

He jerked on the wheel, trying to correct it but the truck just spun too far the other way. It happened quick, too fast for him to slam on the brakes before suddenly he heard a crash, and the smell of burning rubber wafted in through the windows and smoke covered his windshield.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so sorry this one is crazy short compared to the first chapter! that one was a bit of a monster, but it's taken me so long to update so I figured it would be better to break up the last two parts into four parts, so this is going to be five chapters now instead of three!
> 
> sorry for any typos, I honestly did not even look over this before I published it, so I'm sure there are a few.
> 
> Please please let me know what you thought! And I will try to update soon! drop by my tumblr (ofhobbitsandwomen) to let me know what you thought, or talk to me about bellarke in general! happy to take any prompts you may have :)


	3. Chapter 3

_“So,” Bellamy patted the hood of the truck. “What do you think?”_

_He glanced over to Miller, or where he thought Miller had been standing next to him, only to see him rolling away, not even paying attention to him as he swerved around the lot on his board._

_“Come on, man.” He shook his head, kicking his own board so it rolled into Miller, stopping it. “It took me like three years to save up for this, you could at least pay attention.”_

_“What do I think?” Miller asked. “I think this town has 3,000 people in it and a square mileage so small it doesn’t take more than ten minutes to walk anywhere.” He shook his head, walking over to the truck. “I think you definitely could have spent your money on something better.”_

_Bellamy rolled his eyes, waving him off. It was a good truck. The paint was a little chipped and there were a few dents in the bed, but it drove, so it would do the job. It was a good truck._

_“I’m gonna need this truck when I move out,” he said._

_Miller snorted. “Yeah, you’re definitely going to need a full truck for your bag of flannels and box of old paperbacks, man.”_

_“Octavia is going to school soon, she’ll need help moving her stuff,” he protested weakly._

_Miller just stared at him. Bellamy felt a flush work up his neck and he turned away from Miller, walking around, inspecting the truck instead of facing what his friend was really trying to say. Which was that it was pointless for a guy like him to buy a car when he was never going to get out of Ark anyway._

_And he was right, deep down Bellamy knew it, in the pit of his stomach he’d always had a gut feeling that every move he made in this down sunk him deeper and deeper into it’s dirt, pulling him in as a staple of the town as much as the big old oak tree near the library. He’d never be able to leave. He’d tried once, didn’t even make it a year before he had to drop out of school. The community college, not even out of the county, and he couldn’t make it. He was never going to get out of that godforsaken town, and a few years down the line he’d be cursing himself for wasting his money on an old truck, with Miller standing beside him at the shop, still shaking his head._

_Miller stopped him, a hand on the front of his shoulder._

_“Come on, seriously,” he said, a softer look in his eyes. “Why’d you buy it?”_

_Bellamy shook his head hopelessly._

_It was stupid, he knew it was stupid, but he’d hoped that maybe if he had something more than a bag of shirts and a box of books to his name, if he’d had a way to get away without stopping at four different bus stops in town, then he’d be able to do it._

_“It just,” he sighed. “Maybe, someday, I’ll be able to get out, you know? It’s not like I’ve always dreamed of being a mechanic. Once Octavia’s out of school, and I’ve saved up enough money, I could go somewhere where I can do something else.”_

_“You could have put it toward school. Finally go back, now that you have a little more money.”_

_Bellamy snorted._

_“Yeah, and what, work full time while I’m in school so I don’t have to choose between Octavia dropping out, or me dropping out again? Not likely.”_

_Miller dipped his head, a sign Bellamy recognized as his way of giving up. Miller knew him well enough that he wouldn’t waste his time trying to convince him that he could do something when they both knew he couldn’t. He skated around a bit more, actually checking out the truck. Swinging back over to Bellamy he smiled._

_“It’s nice.” He clapped him on the back. “Maybe now you’ll finally get a girlfriend.”_

_“Yeah,” Bellamy said shoving him. “Because that’s what was getting in the way of my romantic life. Transportation.”_

_Miller held up his hands in surrender. “All I’m saying is it isn’t super sexy when you offer to pull you dates home in that old rusty wagon of yours. Might get more takers with this.”_

_“I have never pulled a girl home in that wagon, Miller.”_

_“Whatever,” Miller shrugged. He pulled a tape out of his pocket and tossed it to Bellamy. “Comes with a radio right?”_

_Bellamy turned the tape over in his hands, reading Miller’s tiny scrawl, listing out the songs on the tape, noting that they were mostly songs that Miller liked, not him, but appreciating it anyway. He’d drawn a small little skull on the front, like he was some kind of badass punk instead of the guy who had a crush on the bag boy, Monty, at the market. Bellamy wondered if the tape had originally been for him._

_“Yeah,” he said. “But you’re never getting a ride in this now, so don’t hold your breath.”_

***

Smoke billowed up around his windshield in a cloud. Bellamy’s forehead ached from where it collided with the steering wheel, and when he lifted it up he saw a red welt forming in the shape of the wheel above his brow. There was a smell too, a horrible burning, rubbery smell, that made him gag as he reached down and yanked his seatbelt off of him.

“Fuck,” he said, softly, rubbing his forehead. “ _Fuck_.”

He scrambled out of the truck, yanking the keys out of the ignition as he tumbled out. He didn’t even hear how hard the door slammed after he pushed it shut as he hurried over to the front. 

He’d skidded off the road, right into a tree. The tires were sunken into the grass at the base of the tree, caked in dirt, chunks of ripped up grass scattered on the ground around him. The hood of the car looked like a crumpled piece of paper, pushed up and cracked, leaking clouds of smoke from the cracks. 

“Fuck,” he said again. 

He waved his arms, pushing the smoke away and waiting for it to die down before he pushed the hood of the truck up. 

He dropped his head. 

“ _Fuck_.”

***

There wasn’t a payphone anywhere along the road. Little dirt trails, winding off into the woods, and benches plopped sporadically along the side of the road, but no payphone. Not that he had much change on him anyway, or the number of a local mechanic, so it would’ve been useless for him to have found one regardless. So he’d shoved the keys in his pocket, and started back down the road toward the lake where he’d left Clarke, hoping his car wasn’t towed away for some sort of road violation in the meantime. 

The road was longer than he’d remembered it being while he was driving, and more winding too. He was getting more impatient with every step, increasingly frustrated at every turn that didn’t end in the trail he’d pulled out of. What hadn’t even been a ten minute drive turned into nearly forty five minutes of him walking before he even spotted the trail down to the lake again. 

Clarke was sitting exactly where he’d left her, slumped over her sketch pad, her bottom lip between her teeth. When she heard his footsteps she looked up, slamming the book shut and pulling it in close to her. At first she looked happy, a slow smile stretching across her face at the sight of him, but it slipped off when she caught sight of the state of him, her eyebrows scrunching together as she pushed herself off the bench. 

“What the hell happened to you?”

She stepped toward him, her arm reaching out toward him but he ducked away, stepping to the side as her arm fell down in the empty space in front of her. 

“Bellamy,” she insisted. “You’ve been gone over an hour, what happened? Where’s the truck?”

He sighed, unsure how to explain anything that had happened, a wave of heat washing over the skin on the back of his neck. 

“The truck skidded off the road,” he said, avoiding her eye. 

“What?” There was panic in her voice, a layer of concern he wasn’t quite expecting. 

“Just,” he sighed. “Come on, We’ve got to walk to the shop to use their phone to call a mechanic, and it’s at least forty five minutes until the truck, and the shop is even further down the road. Hopefully they’ll have a phone book or know the number of someone we can call--”

“Can you shut up for just like a second?” Clarke stopped him. “Can you explain what the hell happened? Did somebody hit you?”

“No, it just--” he cut off, unsure of what to say. _No, nobody hit me, just regular automotive negligence, don’t worry_. Anyway he twisted it, the truth was humiliating. Even when he was telling it to a girl who begged a stranger to drive her across the country for money. 

He felt a little dizzy, his hand reached out the the picnic table to steady himself. He’d been propelled forward before, getting out of the truck and back to the lake, figuring out what he had to do, but now slowing down, trying to figure out how to explain it, standing in front of Clarke looking for a way out of talking about it, he couldn’t focus his energy all on one thing anymore, and he felt the edges of his vision go fuzzy, black creeping in before he steadied himself and squeezed his eyes shut. 

“Here,” she said, her hands guiding him down to sit on the bench. “Just sit for a minute.”

He felt the bench shift under her weight and she sat down next to him, but she didn’t press him anymore. She sat silently next to him as he breathed slowly in and out, counting the seconds it took for his breath to move into his lungs and back out again. 

“Sorry,” she said. “Terrible bedside manner.”

He cracked an eye open and saw her smiling hesitantly at him, waiting for him to give the all-clear that it was okay for her to break the tension, that it was okay for her to try again. He gave a weak smile in return.

“Probably not what you were hoping to walk back into after being in an accident,” she carried on. 

He huffed out a laugh. “Probably weren’t expecting me to come back without the truck when I promised sandwiches.”

“Yeah,” she said, voice teasing. “I’m fucking starving. Couldn’t have limped over to the store to pick me up something to eat before coming back here?”

He rolled his eyes and stretched out his legs. He hadn’t been limping, she was just teasing, but it felt nice to sit for a minutes. He didn’t feel too rattled but he felt like he hadn’t taken a few seconds breath since he dropped Octavia off at school. Maybe this was the universe telling him to slow the hell down. 

“Here” she said, her fingers reaching out to his chin. He twitched, pulling backwards when he felt the pads of her fingertips push against the underside of his chin. “Let me look at that mark on your forehead.”

He remembered the splotchy red welt on his forehead, from where he slumped into the steering wheel, as he allowed her to turn his head toward her. He thought it would have faded in his walk back, but she was looking at him with squinted eyes, her bottom lip pinched between her teeth in concentration. Her hands hadn’t left his chin, gripping it in place like he was going to tear away before she’d finished. 

“Not so bad,” she said. Her voice was quieter, softer than before. “It might bruise, but I don’t see any other cuts or anything. Your pupils look fine, not dilated so I don’t think you have a concussion, unless there’s something you’re not telling me.”

It was weird to see her like this. Jarring, almost, that she could flip the switch so fast from carefree girl sketching at a lake, to concerned... _friend_? If that was the right term for whatever they were. Driving buddies. Hitch-hiker and enabler. Or runaway and enabler. Whatever they were. That the fact that she’d been in school, studying to be a doctor, which had been so easily hidden and forgotten about before, was suddenly wildly apparent, making him wonder how he ever could have questioned it. 

“Nope,” he said, popping his lips at the end of the word. He stood up, her hands finally off his skin, and knocked his knuckles on the table. “Come on. We should get going.”

*** 

She was having a hard time reading him. 

Not that she’d had any particular aptitude for reading him in the short time she’d known him, but he was walking in shadows now, dodging any accidental exposure he might give to what he was really thinking. One moment he’d be gruff and short, refusing to answer any questions she asked, and the next he’d be soft and apologetic, crinkled eyes looking at her with confusion. Confused at her concern, confused at himself, she didn’t know, but he was tiptoeing around her conversation and she was beginning to feel dizzy. 

He was walking a few feet in front of her, a tense ripple between his shoulderblades. He would toss a glance over his shoulder every couple of minutes, checking to see that she was keeping up, but other than that he wasn’t bothering with her. 

He’d humored her the first few minutes after he’d come back, letting her check out his injuries, answering questions about how far down the road the truck was, how far from it was from the truck to the nearest shop, but with each question he’d gotten more and more closed off. 

“Are you ever going to explain to me what happened?” she called up to him.

He looked over his shoulder, pausing so she could keep up with him, but he didn’t say a word. She could practically hear window shutters closing, blocking her from seeing anything going in his head. 

“I told you,” he grumbled. “The truck skidded off the road.”

She turned away from him, drinking in the scene around them. It was a flat road. Wide and long and smooth. It even looked as if it’d been repaved fairly recently. No potholes, no stray rocks scattered across the path. It hadn’t been raining, it was sunny and clear. She hadn’t even seen any animals, not even a squirrel, while they’d been walking, and she was sure if the sound of their awkward, nearly silent, scuffling scared off the animals then the old rumble of his surely would have stopped anything from running out into the road. 

“How?” she asked. She watched the tick in his jaw, his teeth clenched, clearly annoyed at her, tired of her questions, but he was being evasive and she was tired. She’d been driving for hours and when she thought she was about to get a break, she had to hike through god knows where to find a broken down truck and a phone, and he wouldn’t even tell her what happened. 

“Well,” he said. “First it was on the road, then, when the tires turned, it moved off of it.”

“Can you not be such a dick for like five minutes?” she asked. 

He stopped, staring at her with a cold expression. She felt a chill run down her spine and if she could reach into the air and grab back the words, she would swallow them whole. 

“I think you’ve been laboring under the impression that, because you’ve spent a few hours sitting in my truck, it’s now just as much your business as it is mine what happens to it when I’m driving it.” He voice was short, like he was spitting out the words with a great deal of pain. “Well, it’s not. I was driving, you weren’t in the car, and I got into an accident. That’s all you need to know.”

Clarke clenched her fists at her side, willing herself to keep her mouth shut, to shove down the words she could feel bubbling up inside her, to beat back whatever heavy feeling that was swirling in her gut from his speech and his expression, because it didn’t matter. She told herself that silently over and over in her head. _It doesn’t matter it doesn’t matter it doesn’t matter._

But she couldn’t help herself. 

Too much had happened in the past few weeks and she didn’t care how angry he was or what the anger was about, she was done letting things explode around her without punching back. 

“Like hell it is,” she said. He was walking away from her, his footsteps wide and heavy, marching, and she almost had to jog to keep up with him but she didn’t care. “You crashing your car leaves me stranded here too, so you’re going to tell me what the hell happened, because it’s just as much my business as it is yours, no matter how much you might hate that.”

He didn’t answer her. He didn’t even look at her but she could see his anger hardening in her face. 

A small part of her just wanted him to crack. There she was, drowning in her own anger, her own desperation, and enough self pity to fill the whole damn lake she was just at, and she didn’t know how to keep it in anymore. It was infuriating to watch him stand there and give nothing away, no hint as to what he was thinking while she was standing there like an open book. 

“Why’d you even come back to get me?” she yelled after him. “If it’s really none of my business why didn’t you just keep walking down the road and call a mechanic? What was the point in coming back for me?”

He whipped around to face her, anger spilling off of him in thick waves. 

“I came back to get you because this is where you pay up,” he spat. “That was the deal right? I help you run away from the woefully high standards of your Ivy League life, and you cough up the cash whenever we need it?” She thought there would be some sort of sick smile on his face as he said it, reminding her just how much he really hated her, reminding her that any moments of pleasantness between them were accidental, unlikely to happen again but there was nothing. An unnerving sort of defeatedness etched across his face and it made the lump in her stomach grow even heavier. “Well, we need it now, princess.”

Never in her life did she want to smack someone as much as she did then. 

“Fuck you, Bellamy.”

Her fingers, wrapped around her sketchbook, felt cold. She’d had to carry it with her, too big for it to fit in any of her pockets and too precious for her to leave behind, too personal to give to Bellamy to hold onto when he offered. Out of obligation, she figured now. It was his fault they had to walk over an hour down the road, so he’d help out his hand saying he’d take it so she didn’t have to worry about it. She thought it was sweet, in the moment, but now the memory tasted bitter. 

Either way, she’d clutched it to her chest, shaking her head saying she could hang onto it. It wasn’t that heavy, anyway. And it wasn’t, but now she felt it weighed down by what she’d been sketching in it as he’d come up behind her, before this all started, and she felt her skin grow red with embarrassment.

It was good, in a way, that he’d reminded her exactly what he thought of her before she’d gone and ripped it out to give it to him. 

She was there for money. That was the only reason he’d let her jump into that truck back at the gas station and the only reason he’d let her stay since then. No matter their best moments, the ones where she found them joking or smiling or talking without the usual fire behind their words, or playfully going through the tapes in the box under the passenger seat, she had to remember that. Anyone could put on an act for enough cash, and that’s what she was. 

She almost laughed, the longer she thought about it. How dumb she was to think anything else, especially after that disastrous night together. He ran out of the room, he hadn’t slept, all because he’d touched her. But then she’d been naive enough to think that he was coming around to her when he’d let her continue to tag along? Of course it wasn’t. 

Of course it was the money. 

*** 

The rest of the walk had been silent, with Bellamy behind her as she stormed ahead of him. 

She’d barely looked at the truck when they’d passed it. She saw the dented hood, and the big tree holding it in place, but she couldn't force any more energy into looking at it. All she wanted to do was get to the shop, use their phone and get it all over with. Every second she spent on the silent walk with Bellamy ate at her, prickling her skin and making her feel queasy. 

The phone was for paying customers only, so she bought a couple of sandwiches since she could hear the rumbling from both their stomachs anyway, and shoved one into Bellamy’s hand before pushing her way back through the crowd and finding a bench outside the shop. She plopped down and ripped into the wrapper covering her sandwich, biting into it while she tried to slow her breathing. It was a few minutes before she heard the ringing of the bell on the door, and then Bellamy was sitting down next to her. 

“Tow is coming. They said they’d stop here and pick us up on the way.” He sighed. “We can figure out a place to stay from there.”

She nodded. “Sounds fine.”

She knew it wouldn’t be a one day fix. She may not know anything about cars, but she knew they wouldn’t be able to just drive it into a shop and have them take care of it in a few hours so they could be on their way again. She wasn’t sure she was ready to jump back into the car with Bellamy right away anyway. 

“Look,” he started. “About before--”

But she cut him off. “Just don’t.”

She didn’t want to hear whatever excuse he had. She didn’t want to hear a lame half hearted apology, she just wanted to finish her sandwich and get the truck to a mechanic. That’s all she wanted. 

He bit his lip, looking at her with wide, sorry eyes, but her head was still shaking so he nodded, leaning back and eating his sandwich in silence as they waited. 

*** 

The back of his throat felt like it was lined with bile. Every bite of his sandwich tasted dry and crumbling and stale, and there was no room in his stomach for food around the rock that currently sat there. 

Briefly he wondered how often he’d have to choke on his own words, wishing to take them back, and if it was always going to be at the expense of Clarke’s feelings that he learned what a jerk he was. 

He didn’t mean it. 

Well. Part of him did. There was no denying that. It was hard to look at her, hard to bear being around her and talking to her while she would always be miles above him. Hurting, but in a completely different world than him. Knowing that if circumstances were different, if her life wasn’t what it was right now, they’d never meet, she’d never talk to him, and he’d never be worth a second thought to someone like her.

They existed on different planes, that was all. And it didn’t matter because they’d be parting ways soon, and he’d go back to his life before her and she’d go back to her life before him, and neither would worry about the angry driving companion from that one road trip they took that one time when everything was falling apart.

But it was still hard to look at her sometimes, knowing that.

But he wished he hadn’t snapped. They’d been in a good place. And in one hot swell, he’d wiped that all away. 

He heard the roll of tires over pavement from down the road and he watched in silence beside her as the tow truck pulled it’s way up toward them, biting his tongue every time he had something to say to her because he knew she didn’t want to hear it. 

*** 

The repair shop was in the middle of a small town, a library on one side of it and a diner on the other. A few minutes, walking, down the road and there was a small bed and breakfast that they mechanic recommended to them, so they could have a comfortable place to stay while the car was getting fixed up. 

She walked up behind Bellamy and cleared her throat. 

“You don’t really need me here,” she said, nodding at the truck. “We don’t pay until it’s all finished, and I won’t understand anything they’re saying anyway. I’m sure you’ve got this covered.”

It was a weak excuse, but he nodded so she carried on. 

“I’ll go down and get us a room at the B&B. You can meet me there when you’re done here,” she said. Though he might not want to, she thought to herself. “Or, whenever.” 

He opened his mouth to say something, but then he paused and she took it as her chance to walk away. She heard a breath being let out slowly behind her as she walked away, but she didn’t look back at him, not ready to have whatever conversation it was that they both knew they had to have. 

She wrapped her arms around her sketchpad and pulled it in close to her body, making her way down the street, the truck growing smaller and smaller behind her. 

***

It was a few hours later when he finally made it to the hotel. He’d hung around the shop for a bit as they started work on the car, but there was no reason to hang around too long. They needed the next day too, so he’d wandered out, walking down the street not really going anywhere, feeling a strange sense of familiarity with every passing step. 

He was growing far too accustomed to feeling alone and out of place. 

Eventually he caved and started walking toward the bed and breakfast, wondering if he and Clarke were going to be sharing another room, or if she’d finally had enough of him and his outbursts. Stopping at the front desk he grabbed his key, surprised to find that she booked just the one room. 

“Your girlfriend said you’d be stopping by,” the woman at the desk said, shipper. “Said you were probably off exploring the town!”

“She’s not my--” Bellamy started, taking his key from her hand, but he trailed off. What was the point? He was never going to see this woman again. Who cared what she thought? “Thanks.”

“So sorry to hear about your car,” she continued on. “We hope you enjoy your stay here, however short.”

He nodded, backing away from the desk, hoisting his duffle bag over her shoulder. Things like that were why he hated small towns. It was the same in Ark. Everybody knew everybody’s business and nobody let you get away without talking about it first. Never a quick trip for any errand. 

He hesitated before letting himself into their room, wondering how he was going to manage to explain himself to Clarke. She hadn’t wanted to hear it before, but he couldn’t let the day end with that cloud hanging over them. They’d been in a good place, nearly like friends he would even say, and he’d messed it up, taking his own anger out on her. 

He wouldn’t be surprised if she hated him, he was starting to think that maybe he did too. 

She was curled up on the far bed when he let himself in, hunched over her sketchpad again, and she didn’t even look up when he stepped into the room. 

He cleared his throat. 

“We should probably talk,” he said. She nodded, head still bent over the pad, so he dropped his bag down and fell onto the bed next to hers. He took a deep breath, unsure how to even begin. 

“I shouldn’t have flipped out on you like that, it was completely out of line.”

She lifted her head up from the sketchpad at that, twisting and readjusting so she was facing him, her legs crossed over each other, her elbows on her knees. She nodded, telling him to go on. 

“When I was driving, before, I just, I don’t know what happened. It’s like what you told me about your dad was just bouncing around in my head and I couldn’t think of anything else, and I was blindingly jealous, which I know isn’t fair because your dad is gone and you told me all that because you miss him and it’s unfair of me to use that to get angry about anything in my life, but I just couldn’t help it.” 

He stopped for a moment, his fingers curling in tightly on his lap. It was happening again, a red heat pooling over him and he needed to get out from under it. He took a few slow breaths and started again. 

“It just doesn’t make sense to me. How we’re in the same place right now, when everything, _everything_ in our lives has been so different. I don’t get how the way you grew up and the way I grew up could lead us to the same place.”

She shuffled forward so her legs dipped off the mattress, dangling in front of his. There was such a small space between the beds that had he been sitting a few inches over, their toes would have been touching, bumping together as they swung. 

_Little trades_ , she’d said about her dad. How different it had been for him. How ridiculously and impossibly different for him and yet, here the two of them were together. 

He could picture his mom, stumbling in the front door after Octavia had gone to bed, thin and ragged, her small clothes hanging loose on her body and a slick sweaty stench covering her skin. A small pat to his cheek as she passed him by before stumbling into the kitchen. 

“I don’t get how I can be so fucking pissed at her,” he said, wincing at the crack he heard in his voice. “And still wish she was here.”

It didn’t make sense. He shook his head, willing the heat at the bridge of his nose to go away, feeling a red stain grow against his cheeks as he noticed the tears welling in his eyes. Quickly he flopped down onto his back, twisting around so his head landed on the pillow, his feet bouncing up and landing at the edge of the bed. He squeezed his eyes shut and let gravity do its job, feeling a small drop trickle down the right side of his face from the corner of his eye to his ear. 

“She was never a great mom,” he said, voice scratchy. “But she was better than no mom.”

Clarke didn’t say anything, but the silence wasn’t as heavy as before. He heard her let out a small breath, and he heard the shuffling of sheets and limbs as she pulled her legs up onto her bed, swinging around and laying down like him, a mirror, with her arm even tucked behind her head like his was. 

“She was better on weekends,” he said, quietly. Almost like he didn’t even realize he was still talking out loud. “Because that’s when Octavia was around. She would spend all of Saturday morning cleaning the house--washing all the dishes by hand and go through every room, dusting, vacuuming, singing along to her favorite records the whole time. We got suckered into doing a lot of chores that way.”

He’d always wanted to be with his mom when she was like that. Smiling, happy, loving them. 

“She wasn’t very good at showing them that she loved us,” he said. “That she cared that we were there and healthy and okay, but when she did, and when you could see it, it left a warm feeling in your gut for days, almost enough to get you through the bad ones.”

He shook his head, ignoring the fear and the anger and the sadness twisting together in a knot. in his stomach, welling up to a terrible size, taking over. 

“Until the bad days came, of course.” He shook his head again, shaking the tears down off his face onto his pillow. “It doesn’t make any sense because I hate her almost everyday, for what she did to herself and how she made us live, but if I could bring her back I wouldn’t even think about it.”

He didn’t see her sit up but he could hear her mattress shifting and he could feel her eyes on her. Suddenly he remembered that he’d come in to apologize to her, to make things right between them, and he pushed himself up, his back slumped against the headboard.

“I got caught up in my own head after you told me that story about your dad,” he said, tilting his head to the side to meet her eye. She was looking at him with soft, careful eyes. “And it doesn’t excuse how I treated you after, and I’m really sorry for that. I just wanted you know it wasn’t you that I was mad at.”

She paused, pulling a lip between her teeth a moment before answering. 

“Just me you were taking it out on,” she said, but there was a smile on her face so he thought maybe, he’d scraped himself out of the hole he’d dug them into. 

“Yeah,” he sighed. “Tomorrow you can lash out at me for whatever emotional trauma’s you’ve repressed and we can call it even.”

She barked out a laugh next to him and he rolled over so his whole body was facing her. She caught his eye while she was laughing and he couldn’t help the smile creeping onto his face, letting out a small, shaking laugh of his own. Her shaking knocked her sketchbook down into the space between them and as he reached out his hand to pick it up for her she gave a small, quick shout. 

“Wait!” She rolled over and her arm dangled off of the bed, fingers playing with the ends of the book until she’d turned it enough to grasp it in her hand. She pulled it up and propped herself up on the elbow of the arm beneath her, flipping to a page toward the back of the book. When she’d flipped it open, she handed the pad, folded open to a sketch, over to him. 

“I drew this at the lake,” she said. “I did it kind of quickly and it was from memory so it’s not the best but…”

It was him, he noticed when he looked down. Well, mostly his hands. One gripped tight around the steering wheel of the truck, the other fiddling with a knob of the radio beside him. There was a corner of the page where his profile peeked out, mostly his lips and his nose, loose hair falling over his eyes.

It was incredible. He thought, maybe, he’d remembered the moment she was trying to capture there. It was when she’d popped in that Bangles tape--forced it back into the stereo after he’d ejected it actually--she must have caught him singing along at some point. It was hard not to once you knew the words, but he’d been playing with the volume knob, trying to drown out any evidence that he ever listened close enough to know the words. 

Silly, probably. It might not have even been what she was drawing. 

She reached out her hand. “Really, it’s not my best--” but he shook his head. 

“No,” he said, still staring at it. “It’s really good. Really good, Clarke.” He hesitated, chewing the inside of his cheek. “Could I look through the rest?” If that was what she could do from memory, he couldn’t even imagine what it would be like when she had something to reference. 

“Uh,” Clarke’s cheeks were stained red, and she was avoiding his eye. “Sure, I guess. If you want.”

He flipped through, slowly, looking at each one. There were a lot of her a girl with strong eyes, and wild dark hair. Raven, she’d told him when he flipped to the third one of her in a row. Another woman, with a fierce expression, made it in a few times too. Her roommate, Anya, she explained. 

The rest were bits of people. Hands and knees and chests and shoulders, necks and ears, and part she could watch for long enough to memorize. There were a few landscapes, the lake they’d been at. One of his truck. They were really good. Better than really good. He didn’t really know a lot about art, so he didn’t know what to say but they were incredible. 

He kept flipping back to the one of his hands. 

“Is there...Could I,” he paused, hoping she’d catch on without actually making him say it. She just stared at him, waiting. “Could I have this?”

“Yeah, dummy,” she said smiling. “That’s what it was for.” 

He rolled his eyes, but carefully tore out the drawing, putting it aside on the table between their beds. 

He kicked off his shoes and unbuckled the belt to his jeans, pushing them down. He thought maybe he should find some sweats to wear over it, but he usually slept in his boxers anyway, and really, what modesty was left between them, so he just shoved them down and tossed them onto the duffle bag at the side of his bed. Climbing under the covers, he reached over and clicked the light off on his side. 

The room was eerily quiet, not heavy like before, but like it wasn’t quite ready to for them to be done, for the air to be empty and silent. 

“Clarke,” he said. He watched her roll over on her side, her head on top of her folded arm. She hummed in response, letting him know she was listening. “I really am sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she said nodding. “I get it.”

***

Bellamy, it turned out, was actually amazingly easy to talk to when he wasn’t being a total ass. 

She already suspected it, since she hadn’t been primed to murder him the entire trip, just the past few hours. And the beginning few. And a few in between. 

But there were definitely some good hours mixed in there too. 

They’d been flopped back on their respective beds for over an hour. Mostly talking, but sometimes they’d get quiet and let themselves sit there with the silence, not feeling pressed under it like before, but floating in it, waiting until something else came up. And it was nice. 

“You’re weird about your truck,” she said, breaking the silence.

“Is this a dig at the fact that I crashed my car today?” He laughed as he answered her. “Are you trying to kick me while I’m down?”

She twisted herself over, her head propped up on her hand, her elbow bent beneath it. 

“No,” she said. “I’m mean you’re protective. It took a lot of convincing for you to even let me hold the keys. You were about to hop into the driver’s seat and fall asleep at the wheel and I practically had to physically restrain you in order for you to let me drive. It’s like it’s your baby, or something.”

She heard him sigh and he twisted himself over, facing her. When he started talking he was still smiling lightly at her, but his voice was soft, and cautious. 

“It took me a long time to save up for the truck,” he said. “Which probably seems ridiculous to you, that truck is a piece of junk, I know. But I had to work full time at the shop to help pay for my mom’s medicine and make sure Octavia still got to go to school. There wasn’t a lot of money left over once I’d factored in bills and groceries too.”

Clarke felt a lump grow in her throat. She’d known things were different for them. She’d known they hadn’t grown up the same way, that she’d had it much easier than him. But his words were slow and calm and she couldn’t help wonder how he wasn’t angry all the time, how he wasn’t more of a jerk to her. 

She could see it, a bit, under the calmness of his words. The anger that was still there. But it seemed old and weak, like he’d worn it out and it was more of a burden than a release for him. 

She tried to school her face into something neutral as he talked. She didn’t want to look like she was pitying him, that was the last thing she needed. But a small, weighted feeling of guilt got heavier on her the longer he spoke, and she wasn’t quite sure what to do about it. 

“Miller’s dad ran the shop, he gave me a job as soon as he heard about everything happening with my mom. There was this old truck there, broken down, basically useless, but he said he’d sell it to me, really cheap too, and we could work on fixing it up together. He knew I didn’t want to stay in Ark forever. He was a good guy.” He swallowed before he continued talking. “It was a stupid sort of symbolic thing, an annoying reminder that I wasn’t doing what I was supposed to be doing for all the time I was stuck in Ark after I got the truck. It took so long to get it up to what it is now and then it just sat in my driveway for awhile.”

He shrugged like it was no big deal. And it probably wasn’t for him. He was used to it, it wasn’t a big story, not a big reveal about himself or anything, just something he’d come to terms with. But Clarke couldn’t help the warm feeling blooming in her chest, something like pride for the man in front of her who did everything he did for someone else and put himself on the back burner for years. Now, finally taking a chance. 

“Jesus. That’s incredible,” she said. He rolled his eyes, but she could see a small blush creeping onto his neck and up into his cheeks. “Really I can’t imagine doing that plus classes.”

“Yeah, well,” his voice was scratchy. “Neither can I. I didn’t.”

He wasn’t looking at her, his eyes staring just below where she was stretched out in her bed, with his bottom lip pulled between his teeth. 

“I, uh, had to drop out of school. There just wasn’t enough time for me to work around my classes”

She nodded, trying to catch his eye, but he sat up and stretched his arms before pulling himself off of his bed altogether. 

“I think I’m going to shower,” he said, and then he ducked into the bathroom before she could get another word in. 

***

She was curled up on her mattress, the sheet pulled tight around her, when he walked out of the bathroom, his hair wet and dripping into his eyes. 

It seemed impossible that just the night before he’d been walking like a ghost into their hotel room after running away from her, sneaking into his bed, refusing to look at her out of shame, and disappointment in himself.

Now it felt entirely different, walking into the room where she was sleeping in the opposite bed. Something had shifted and the air felt bigger, more flexible, and easier to breathe in. He still tiptoed in case she’d fallen asleep, but he wasn’t hiding as he shuffled down into his own bed, pulling his covers up around him. 

“Bellamy?” he heard Clarke whisper toward him through the dark room. 

“Mhm?” he hummed in response as he settled in his bed, getting comfortable. 

“We’re...alright now,” she asked, hesitant. “Right?”

He thought of the day, the long, long day, and everything that had happened, everything he’d done and said, and every way she’d reacted to him. 

“Yeah,” he said. “We’re good. Goodnight, Clarke.”

She hummed into her pillow in response, rolling over, pulling it tighter against her body. “Night, Bellamy.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> really unsure about this chapter so please let me know your thoughts!!


	4. Chapter 4

He was up before her the next day, making coffee in the tiny little coffee maker in their room, and brushing his teeth. She woke up to the sound of a crash and a soft “ow,  _ fuck _ ,” from the other side of the room. 

“What’s happening over there?” she groaned into her blankets. She peeked one eye open and saw him dabbing a towel onto a wet stain on the front of his right pant leg. 

He looked up at her as he wiped his pants down. “Is this not how you make coffee?”

She rolled her eyes and rolled herself back into the mattress, her face shoved into her pillow, the blankets tangled up in between her legs. She heard footsteps come toward her and the tap of something being set down on the nightstand between the beds. 

“You are so not a morning person,” he said. 

She shoved herself up and glanced over, seeing a small cup of coffee sitting on the nightstand waiting for her as Bellamy stood over at the coffee maker, dumping packets of sugar into his. She grabbed it and leaned herself against the headboard so she could drink it without spilling it all over herself like Bellamy. 

Her face twisted at how bitter it was and he laughed and tossed a sugar packet at her. 

“The truck isn’t going to be done until later,” he said between sips. “I figured we could wander around a bit, explore the town a little so we’re not too bored and we can still check in out it every once in awhile.”

She nodded. “Yeah, sure, that sounds good.” she hopped up off the bed and grabbed some clothes from her bag. “Let me shower and change, and then we can get going.”

She slipped into the bathroom, pulling the door shut tight behind her. She turned the knob on the shower, watching the water get hotter and hotter, steam rising up and filling the bathroom before she stepped in. 

It was strange, Clarke thought, the water cracking  hotly against her skin, to see him like that. Waking up before her and sticking around, making coffee and teasing her and smiling, like they weren’t two strangers stranded by circumstance. It was a window, a glimpse at how Bellamy was when he wasn’t thinking so hard, when he just let himself be. 

It probably wouldn’t last, she knew. She remembered his hand slamming against the radio knob, shutting it off that first day, without a thought, like an instinct you grew when a hurt went so deep it just flowed along through your bloodstream, a permanent part of you. Not just a way of reacting to things but a way of  _ being _ . 

But then she thought of his face as they sat on that bench in front of the diner, what seemed like weeks ago, ice cream dripping down his chin as he tried to chase it with his tongue before it dribbled onto his neck, laughing as he danced along to his friend’s ridiculous mixtape, the light in his eyes as when he told her about his sister, and she wondered if maybe that’s who he really was, who he wanted to be, even if he could count how many times he was that guy on one hand. 

She sighed, splashing water on on her face, scrubbing, trying to get off the small layer of sweat that coated her from the sticky hotel sheets. Today, she thought, today she’d see who he was. See which side of him won out, and how she fit into it all. 

Her feet slid across the bathroom tiles, slipping, and she wondered as her hand reached out to steady herself on the towel bar, how she’d decided that she need to fit somehow with this guy she’d only known a few days, and remembered briefly, the for the first time in hours, that this wasn’t her life. And in maybe just a few days, she’d be back home, or back in school--back to a place where this, all this time with Bellamy, all this time either stuck in her own head or trying to get a peek at his, would all be just a memory. 

***

Bellamy was munching on a muffin when she came out of the bathroom, the freshest clothes she could scrounge out of her bag wrapped around her, and she was starting to wonder if maybe he just kept a stash of them somewhere in his bag. 

He glanced up at her when she walked out of the bathroom. His bag was next to his feet, packed, and the bed he’d been sleeping in was made. When she glanced over to her own, she saw the covers had been folded down, tucked into the mattress, the pillows back at the headboard where they’d been before she knocked them off the mattress and hugged one to her body as she slept. 

“Ready?” he asked. 

She walked over to her bed, her bag on top of it where Bellamy must have put it when he was tidying up. A small smile worming its way onto the corners of her mouth. 

“Yeah,” she said. “Ready.”

He smiled at her and tossed her a muffin. “Chocolate chip this time,” he winked. 

She pulled off a chunk and plopped it in her mouth, following him out of the room. It was soft and sweet. She wondered if she’d ever really know Bellamy at all. 

***

Bellamy shoved a few quarters in her hand when they got to the lobby. He nodded to a payphone across from the check in desk. 

“You told your friend you’d check in with her once in awhile, right?” he asked at her raised eyebrow. “I have to call O, too anyway. You can go first.”

“Okay,” she said, nodding. She tried to hand back his quarters but he shoved his hands in his pockets. “I can cover my phone call, Bellamy. Wasn’t that the deal, anyway?”

Bellamy shrugged, already backing up, making his way to a couch by the door. 

“It’s just a few quarters,” he said. “You can buy me lunch or something.”

She felt a laugh tumble out of her, shaking her head at him, watching as  he spun on his heel, turning away from her, pulling a small paperback out of his back pocket and plopping down onto the cushions as she was left by the phone to call Raven. 

Raven picked up after the first ring. 

“Hello?”

“Rae,” Clarke said. “Hey, it’s me.”

“Anya!” Raven’s shout crackled through the receiver. “She hasn’t been murdered by that guy yet, you owe me $20!”

“Are you kidding me?” Clarke asked. “You bet on whether or not Bellamy would murder me? And you’re hanging out with  _ Anya _ ?”

She heard a muffled conversation in the background, shuffling and the clunk of the phone being knocked around before Raven picked it back up and answered her. 

“It’s been weird without you here. And your apartment always has better snacks than mine.” There was a pause before Raven continued. “When are you coming home?”

Clarke glanced over, across the room to where Bellamy sat, his elbows propped up on his knees holding his book in front of him. She could see the coffee stain from that morning on his pants from where she stood, and she recognized the shirt he was wearing as the same one from the day she met him. His brow was creased, but it looked more in focus than distress, his cheeks sooth while his eyes squinted, and she felt a tug on her ribcage she couldn’t explain. 

“I don’t know, Rae,” she sighed. She didn’t know how to describe it. “I think I’m supposed to be here right now. Just for now.”

She could practically hear Raven rolling her eyes on the other end of the call. 

“I’m not going to be able to stop Anya from getting a new roommate if you’re gone too long you know,” she argued. It was a joke, Clarke knew. Raven was just trying to goad her, remind her that they missed her, get her to come home. 

And she wanted to. A part of her really did want to go home. To go back to her apartment and go to art shows and movies and clubs with Raven and fight with Anya about whose turn it was to take out the trash and buy the dish soap, and yell about messages they forgot to leave for each other on the notepad by the phone. 

But she wanted to go back home to a place where she would still get calls from her parents, the two of them on the phone at the same time, talking over one another. To a home where even when she felt lost it was only for a little while. 

And it just wasn’t like that now. 

She felt lost, like she was stuck in a maze inside a maze, like each turn she took took her deeper and further away from whatever it was that she’d been floating near a few weeks ago. She thought about the cold buzzing in her chest from that bus ride back to school, how it got stronger the closer to school she got, and how it faded just a little when her feet stepped down on the pavement away from it. How each step toward that boy in that gas station, kicking his truck, made the pokes a little weaker. 

“I’ll be home soon,” she promised weakly. “This is just something I have to finish.”

She heard Raven sigh on the other end, unsurprised but not understanding what Clarke was saying. 

“I feel like I was supposed to be with you during all of this,” Raven said softly. “That’s what friends do. You shouldn’t be alone.”

“I’m not alone,” Clarke said. She watched Bellamy’s tongue slip between his lips as he turned the page. 

“Yeah, well, forgive me for being confused as to how I didn’t make the cut, but the crazy guy who picks up strangers at gas stations did.”

“Raven.”

“I’m sorry,” she groaned, but Clarke could hear a laugh in her voice. “I guess I shouldn’t say that to the crazy girl who propositions strangers at gas stations.”

“You’re making it sound way more sexual than it was.”

“Right,” Raven said. “So you haven’t even thought about sleeping with him?’

A wave of heat washed over Clarke as she thought about that night, with Bellamy’s hands on hers, gripping her hips and her ribs, tangling themselves in her hair and she had to squeeze her eyes shut and turn back toward the wall so he wouldn’t catch her blushing. 

“Oh my god,” Raven said, and Clarke realized that she’d been silent too long. “You’ve totally slept with him already. I can’t believe this. Anya owes me another $20.”

“It’s not--ugh,” Clarke groaned. “It’s not like that okay? There was something the other night, but it’s not...we’re friends, I think. Or almost friends?” She glanced back over to where Bellamy sat. He looked up, feeling her eyes on him and gave a small little wave, scrunching his eyebrows together in question. She smiled, shaking her head and turned back away. “It’s hard to tell with him.”

Raven was silent for a moment. “Is he cute?”

“Raven.”

“What?” she said. “It’s a fair question.”

“What do you think?” Clarke chewed her lip. “Yeah, he’s cute, okay? He’s really cute.”

“Good,” Raven sounded satisfied. “Now at least if you get murdered by this guy, I’ll be able to understand why you got in the truck in the first place.”

“Bellamy isn’t going to murder me, Rae. Really.”

She felt a swell of protectiveness over him surge into her. Raven was joking, she wouldn’t actually let her get into a truck with a guy she thought might be a murderer without calling the police and dragging Clarke’s sorry ass home, but there was an edge to her voice that let Clarke know that no matter what she told her, Raven didn’t trust Bellamy. 

“You better tell me next time you sleep with him. I feel like I’m missing out.”

Clarke laughed, nodding even though Raven couldn’t see her. “Sure thing.”

“And call more, okay?”

A pang of guilt poked at her chest. She’d been at home for two weeks before she’d met Bellamy and she’d barely called Raven then. This was probably only the third time she’d spoken to her since she left her apartment the day she heard the news about her dad. 

“Miss you, Raven.”

She heard a muffled sniff on the other end of the line. “Miss you too, Clarke.”

***

“Your turn.”

Clarke’s voice startled him out of his reading. She stood in front of him, smiling tentatively, like she didn’t know if she was supposed to. He flipped his book shut and held it out to her, a raised eyebrow questioning. 

“Oh,” she said, taking it carefully. “Thanks.”

“Don’t know how long O’s gonna talk, you might want something to entertain yourself.” He reached into his pocket, pulling out some coins. “I’ll try and be quick though,” he said before turning around and walking away. 

He heard her faint, “Take your time,” as she plopped down on to the couch where he’d just been. 

The phone rang twice before someone picked up. 

“Hello?”

“Hey,” he said. “It’s me.”

“Hey man,” Miller’s voice crackled through the phone. “Where the hell are you?”

Bellamy sighed, srunching up his face as if he was standing in front of Miller, blocking himself from seeing his reaction, instead of hours away with a shoddy phone line connecting them. “On my way to San Francisco. I guess.”

“You...guess?”

“Yeah there’s…” he trailed off, trying to think of a quick way to explain the last few days. There wasn’t one that made him sound any variation of okay. “There’s a lot happening right now. It’s tough to explain.”

“Dude, did you meet a girl?” He heard laughter in Miller’s voice, and he could picture his lips pinched together to keep the chuckle tucked away, his eyes wide and teasing. It was the first time since he’d dropped Octavia off that he’d felt that pang in his chest that he figured must be homesickness, but he was just too unfamiliar with the notion to know for sure. 

“I need to ask you a favor,” he deflected. 

“Oh my god, there is a girl.”

“Miller,” he groaned. “Focus please? For like half a second?”

He heard Miller sigh, but he stayed quiet waiting for Bellamy, so Bellamy carried on. 

“Can you talk to your dad for me?” He pictured his old truck in the shop down the road, remembering the hours it took to get it running, the hours it took to get enough money for all the parts. Where it all came from. “Apologize to him for me, I mean. He’s done a lot for me, and I kind of just took off without warning there.”

There were a few beats of silence, a dead buzzing in his ear from the receiver, and he wondered maybe if Miller hung up or if the line was so bad that it crapped out halfway through his call. But then he heard Miller take a breath and shuffle the phone around before bringing it back up and answering him. 

“No one’s worried about that man,” Miller said softly. “You’ve got a job here whenever you need one, you know that right?”

“I appreciate that.”

“How are you?”

It was strange, to be having this conversation with Miller with so many miles between them. He couldn’t see him, couldn’t read his face or let his own speak for him like they usually did. He didn’t think a small shake of the head and an  _ “alright, you know, the usual” _ would cover it like it normally did. They were going to have to  _ talk _ . 

He seemed to be doing a lot of that lately. 

“Honestly?” Bellamy said. “I have no fucking clue.” He heard Miller snort and felt relieved that he didn’t think he was crazy. “I was on my way home from dropping Octavia off and then suddenly I wasn’t. I got stuck at a gas station and ran out of money, and now I’m on my way to San Francisco with some girl who offered to pay.”

“Is she cute?”

“Jesus, Miller, that’s what you got out of that?”

“That’s a yes, then.”

He felt his stomach tie in knots and he wasn’t sure if it was because it was true or because he was happy about it. He felt Clarke’s gaze on his back, and he could picture her hands sweeping across the pages, flipping them between her fingers. He knocked his head lightly into the phone when he realized that after only a few days he could picture her hands perfectly. 

“Would it really be that satisfying if I said that she was cute?”

“I wasn’t sure but, yes,” Miller said. “It was.”

Bellamay felt a laugh float out of him and for a brief moment he wished he could reach out and get a hug from his best friend. 

“I miss you,” he said. 

“Pull yourself together,” Miller joked. “You’ve only been gone a few days.”

“Yeah,” Bellamy sighed. “I think…” He trailed off unsure of what to say. It was a few days, just a couple nights in a bed that wasn’t his own, and yet. And yet it felt longer and even though he knew the end of it all was looming near, somewhere down the next stretch of the highway, maybe after another night in another bed that wasn’t his own, he felt like maybe this trip wasn’t just a few days he could tuck into a calendar before getting back to his regular life. “Nevermind. I don’t know what I think.”

“Any idea when you’re coming back?”

It was funny, he thought, that even with the distance between them Miller could read him so easily. Funny how he never called Ark home. Just  _ back _ .

“Nah dude,” Bellamy said. “No idea.”

“Give me a call every couple days, alright?” Miller nearly sounded concerned. “Just so I know you weren’t murdered by that girl.”

“Clarke’s not going to murder me.”

“Ooh,” Miller cooed. “So her name is Clarke?”

“Goodbye, Miller.”

He heard a laugh from the other line. “Bye, Bellamy.”

***

She knew he’d already walked around a bit the night before, when she’d gone back to the room without him, to sulk or to draw, or maybe to make him feel a bit badly about how he was acting, but he seemed happy to be out, walking along the same road again, pointing the occasional thing out to her as they strode in companionable silence. 

The town was essentially one road. It had shops and a diner and a school scattered along the road, clumps of houses on either end, but other than the road they were walking on, Clarke was pretty sure there wasn’t any else to the town. 

She felt Bellamy slow beside her as they passed a display window, yellow paint across the glass, piles of books up behind it. She watched as his gaze fell onto the first display and his feet moved closer to the window, until he caught her watching him. He shrugged, moving back to her side, determined and moving forward. 

“It was closed when I walked by last night,” he said. “That’s all.”

She pressed the smile at the corner of her mouth down. “Let’s go in.”

“Oh, no, we don’t have to--” he starred but she cut him off. 

“C’mon,” she said, stepping toward the door whether he was following her or not. “It’s not like we have anything else we really need to do, right?”

He nodded but didn’t move from where he was and she could see the beginnings of a blush creeping up from his neck to his cheeks.

“I’ll go in alone if you won’t come with me,” she said, turning away. “It looks pretty cool though, so I think you might be missing out.”

She didn’t have to wait to see if he was following her, she heard the hff of his breath and the scuffle of his feet and she could feel the weight of his presence behind her. Something she’d grown used to in the past few days, a weight she wasn’t sure she would do without when the time came. 

She dipped off to the right of the store, art book catching her eye in a corner where framed paintings and photographs cluttered the wall, as he went start to the back, past the counter to a shelf that touched the ceiling under a set of stairs that led to what she could only assume was an apartment a floor above them. 

She flipped through pages of old books for what felt like only moments but could have been hours. The smell of wood and paper and graphite, the sound of footsteps and scribbling and chuckling and sighing surrounding her. She bumped into Bellamy twice, both of them walking slowly, swaying side to side in front of shelves with their noses in books, too concentrated to notice what they were doing until they toppled into each other, making the books fall with a clunk to the ground. 

“Something interesting?” He joked as he bent to pick up what had been knocked out of their hands. 

She smiled as he handed her book back over, and reached her arm out to tip the cover of his down so she could read it. 

“What’ve you got?” She asked, curious, tipping forward on her toes to get a better look but he was sliding back, out of her reach before she could see it. 

“Nothing,” he said. “Just flipping through.”

It was strange, but she shrugged, because everything was strange with Bellamy and at least today things were warm and strange, a bubble she could bounce around in without fear of it popping. It was a nice shift from the stilted, careful strange that had been washing over them for days. 

A few minutes later she finds him sat in a corner, a stack of books on one side of his legs, crossed in front of him, another flipped open resting against his toes. His bottom lip was pulled into his teeth, worrying away, and he didn’t hear her shift the stack of books she held from one hip to another and she walked up to him, and he barely noticed until she was plopped down in front of her. 

“Oh,” he said, startled. “Hey. We can go if you --”

She shook her head. 

“Nah, I’d like to check a few of these out, but it’s hard to do it standing,” she said. “If you don’t mind staying a bit longer.”

He nodded, shrugging like he didn’t care but she could see a faint smile working its way onto his cheeks, but she glanced away, focusing down on her books, before he could catch her staring. 

It did something in the pit of her stomach, his smile, twisting a curling it, making her feel like it was about to flip out of her while it spread a warm rush through her at the same time, and she wasn’t sure what to make of it all. So she kept track of them, tucking each smile away in her brain, ready to pull them back out when he shuffled his walls up again. 

The face he made when he was reading was like the one he made while he was driving, stern and concentrated, but ready. His eyebrows were scrunched together and his tongue popped out ever so slightly on occasion, licking his lips before he started chewing on his bottom one. She watched as his free hand drummed out on his leg and an odd sensation of familiarity washed over her, like she was so used to it all that it wove into her life naturally and now she would feel lost without the sound of his fingers tapping against the denim hugging his leg. 

He looked up at her. 

“What?” She asked.

“You’ve got a weird look on your face,” Bellamy said. 

Clarke considered herself for a moment and then burst out laughing. 

“Smiling?” She asked. “Smiling is a weird look on me?”

She watched the blush splotch along his cheeks, lighting up his face and sending waves of heat all over her. 

“You know what I meant,” he grumbled. “You were like...staring at nothing and smiling. You looked like a crazy person.”

“Just shut up and read your books,” she joked. “You grumpy old man.”

“I’m  _ two years _ older than you,” he muttered, but he was smiling down at his book again and she shook her head. 

***

They’d spent an hour in the bookstore, curled up on the floor, their respective piles of books scattered all around them before Clarke complained that her legs hurt and she had to stand up. She dropped one book down next to him as he kept reading and had gathered all her others to go put them back where she’d found them before coming back over to him. 

“Pick one,” she said, grabbing her own from next to him. 

“Excuse me?” He asked.

She rolled her eyes at him and gestured to the books on the ground in front of him. Some were novels, short and small so he could fit them in his pockets if he needed to, others were books of short stories and poetry. Others were more embarrassing. Self help books and school books he wished he could buy, and things he would never want Clarke to see around him, no matter how smooth the day had gone. 

“Pick a book,” she said. 

“Why?”

She stared at him, huffing a breath out from her nose, like she was annoyed at him for missing something she didn’t want to explain. 

“Which one do you want?” She said instead of answering. 

“None,” he said piling them up as he stood, feeling his knees crack as he straightened them out. “I’m not going to buy any of them.”

“Not what I asked,” she said, like she was bored. “Just pick one.”

“Why?” He said, stubborn. 

“Oh my god,” she cried. “You are honestly so much work. Just--constantly. I’m going to buy one for you, okay? Just pick out a book.”

He pulled back confused. His hands ran along the spines of them and he wanted to reach out instinctively for one of the used ones he picked out, battered cover and crinkled spine so it would fit right in with his others, ragged on the shelf. 

His fingers grazed over the spine of a new one, pages fresh and crisp, a hardcover, one he couldn’t fit in his pocket, but would look nice on a night stand of a living room table, to grab at home when he was bored, when he finally had time to relax now that he wasn’t taking care of two other people any time he wasn’t working. 

In the end he grabbed a small, leather bound journal. It pages clear and fresh, no lines running across them, waiting for something to fill them up. 

She smiled as she took it from him, the pads of her fingers running across the soft cover, nodding as she wrapped her hand around it. 

“Okay,” she said. “Be right back, then.”

He watched as she walked off toward the register, her book and his hugged tight to her chest. He wondered if he’d ever write in it, or if it’d sit in a drawer in his nightstand, waiting for him to figure out his thoughts in words he could never come up with. 

***

They’d wandered around for a couple more hours before Bellamy gave in to her pleas for food and they stopped in the diner around the corner from the repair shop. 

He’d been awkward since the bookshop, holding the journal he’d picked out close to him, his knuckles tight around it, even when they went into other shops. She’d offered to carry it in her purse, but he’d just waved her off with a shake of his head saying he didn’t mind. 

She’d shrugged at that, deciding to ignore it, and pulled him into the record store a few doors down from the bookshop they’d gone into. 

He’d walked close behind her around the store, murmuring comments into her as they stood side by side, flipping through records. 

“This one” he’d say, pulling an album out with a band she’d never seen before on the cover, dressed in all black and ripped pants, makeup smeared carelessly across their faces. “This was Miller’s favorite. He used to blast it in the shop while we worked, drove his dad insane.”

She laughed raising an eyebrow at him. “I’m not sure I want to meet Miller, if his music taste is anything to go by.”

He gave her a funny look at that, a strange little smile poking into his cheeks as his eyebrows twitched closer together. 

“Uh, yeah,” he stammered out, shrugging. “Well, that’s Miller.”

He stuck close by her, and she found herself doing the same. Telling him things that no one cared about, things like which album drove Anya up the wall when she played it too loud, or which one she liked to cook to, or which one Raven always played when they were getting ready to go out. She stopped when she stumbled across the record her dad always played when he was developing pictures, and he paused beside her, his hand reaching over hers, his palm brushing against the back of her hand as he slipped the record out of her grasp and into his own. 

“Ah,” he said, straightening it out in front of himself. “I always liked this one.”

He flipped it over, reading the song list on the back and she propped herself up on her toes to read it over his shoulder. 

He glanced back at her, and she forced a small smile on her face. She didn’t want to cry there, in the store thinking of her father, but she couldn’t find the words to explain what it was, clogging her throat and shrinking her smile, but he caught her eye and nodded. 

“This one,” he said, tapping the fourth song on the list. “That was always my favorite.”

He bobbed his head and started to hum. He wiggled his eyebrows as he did, his movements growing bigger and his humming growing louder until he was singing outright, off-key and barely within tempo. He turned so he was facing her, bending down so his face was in line with hers, but his eyes were squeezed shut as he sang. His hands reached out for hers, swaying their linked arms back and forth, not caring about the people staring at them. 

“Oh my god,” she laughed. “Bellamy people are staring.”

“Lucky them,” he said, still humming. “It’s a good song.” 

She let him move around her and let her throat loosen and let herself breathe the air around her without feeling the weight of someone who wasn’t there as Bellamy’s voice washed over her. 

He peeked one eye open at her when he finished up the last verse. Watching her to see if the smile was real or forced this time. 

“The next one is pretty good too, you know…” he started, lifting the record back up to see which one was listed next. “I can always keep going--”

“No way,” she said shoving him in the shoulder. “You’ve got a terrible voice.”

They’d stayed there, browsing and talking, sticking close by even when they were silent, for a while longer. It wasn’t until she felt her stomach rumble beneath her shirt that she glanced over at him and he nodded toward the door. 

“There’s a diner down the road,” he said. “Let’s go grab some lunch and then we can check on the truck.”

*** 

There was a jukebox, brown and red and yellow, booming from the corner of the diner. The booths were filled with couples, old couples, two heads of gray hair popping up from every table. 

A waitress dressed in a poodle skirt and roller blades slid up to them. 

“Hi there!” She said, with a wave to them. “Table for two?”

Bellamy’s eyes were wide when he glanced back at her. “Yeah,” he said, nodding. “That’d be great, thanks.”

She led them over to a booth in the corner opposite the juke box, red cushions glaring up at them. She set the menus down on either side of the table and waited until they’d scooched themselves in, in front of the pace settings before she spoke again. 

“Alright, I’ll give you two a few minutes and I’ll be right back to grab your order!”

Her voice was small and perky and left Clarke feeling like she was far too somber  person to have ever walked through those doors. 

“Want a poodle skirt, Clarke?” Bellamy said, teasing. “I think you could fit right in here.”

“Shut up, you greaser,” Clarke stuck her tongue out at him. 

They sat in silence, reading the menus, and sipping the waters that a server had brought over to them as soon as they’d sat down. Bellamy’s face was softer than normal, but hidden a bit, like the moment at the record store had left him too open and he was trying to overcompensate. Clarke chuckled to herself at the absurdity of it all, and he glanced up at her, eyebrows raised in question. 

She shook her head. 

“I wonder if I’ll ever have another meal  _ not _ in a diner,” she said in lieu of answering whatever it was he didn’t ask.

“Hey, we had muffins for breakfast this morning,” he said. “That wasn’t from a diner.”

The waitress came back over and they ordered, Clarke a burger and onion rings and Bellamy a turkey club. He caught the waitress before he left, asking for two chocolate milkshakes for the table and shrugged when Clarke nodded approvingly. 

“My treat,” he said, holding his hand up when she started to protest. “For the book.”

She wanted to say that the point of the book wasn’t to get anything out of it, it was to buy him something nice, because he deserved it and she wasn’t sure if anyone had done that for him before, and she could tell by the way his fingers danced along the spines of those books that he wanted them. But she watched as he looked away from her and let the protest die on her lips. 

He could buy her a milkshake if he wanted. No harm in that.  Maybe his wall would stay down at least until they left the diner, then. 

They ate in silence, mostly, chewing and fiddling with chips and rings and napkins as they wolfed down what was in front of them, the most interaction between them the exaggerated slurping of the milkshake in front of Clarke that she did just to annoy him. 

“Please,” he groaned. “It’s so gross.”

She slurped louder. 

“Fine,” he said, raising his hands. “Fine.” He grabbed his own milkshake and pulled the straw into his mouth, scrunching up his nose at her as he slurped right back. He stopped after a moment, holding his hand to his forehead, wincing as his face stayed scrunched. 

“Happy?” He asked. “Now I’ve got brain freeze, and apparently, the maturity of a five year old.”

She laughed at him, sipping the last of her milkshake. 

“I don’t really think you can blame me for that,” she said.

He nodded, his eyebrows hidden beneath the hair flopping over his forehead and she thought back to the last diner they sat in, the grungy bench outside where they ate ice cream, the waitress who ignored her to flirt with Bellamy, the sad, small look on his face when they sat down and he started to tell her about his mom dying. 

She looked up at him and saw the hint of something new. Not entirely new. He was still hidden behind another layer, but she felt like she had peeled one away, like she was getting closer with every smile he cracked and every laugh he let tumble from his lips. She didn’t feel like every time they sat down, every time they stopped moving, like something was going to happen. It was nice just to be for a little while, with someone else, the world as they knew it slipping away in exchange for whatever bizarre alternate reality they chose to run away to. 

She heard shuffling all around her and looked up to see the couples around them pulling each other into the middle of the diner, a space on the checkered tile cleared, and each couple paired off, swinging their partner into them, hands resting on waists as they swayed back and forth. 

She caught Bellamy watching with a small, fond smile hidden in the corner of his mouth and she stood up, holding her hand out to him. 

“Come on,” Clarke said. He didn’t say anything, just stared at her hand. She grabbed his and moved to tug him up next to her, but he stayed where he was, rooted to the seat, and she nearly fell forward into him with the force of his resistance. 

“You can’t possibly be embarrassed by this,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Do I need to remind you what happened in the record store?”

“That was...different,” he huffed. “This is, like real dancing.”

“It’ll be fun,” she said. “Come on.”

“No,” he shook his head. “No way.”

She huffed and crossed her arms in front of her. She wasn’t sure what it was about him, but there was something there that always seemed to be fighting with her, even when he wasn’t. Something that made her want. So she tugged on his hand, swaying back and forth on her heels, letting him know that she wasn’t going anywhere. He could come dance with her, or they could stay like that through the whole song, but either way, he was stuck there, his hand in hers, as the song played in the background. 

“This song isn’t even from the fifties,” he grumbled as he stood up. She listened carefully and heard The Temptations crooning through the crackling speakers.

“Whatever, nerd,” she said tugging him fully away from the booth. “It’s a good song.”

The couple around them were swinging, circling them as they sang along. 

_ Well, you could have been anything that you wanted to _

_ And I can tell,  _

_ The way you do the things you do _ . 

She pulled him in front of her, one hand still in his, guiding his movement to the rhythm, the other resting on his shoulder, while his came up to her waist. His thumb, rough and calloused, slipped over the side of her overalls, brushing the strip of bare skin left exposed by her cropped shirt, and she felt a shiver that felt like a memory. 

His hand was warm and soft in a way she had never felt from someone else, like it was resting carefully against her skin, melting into it slowly instead of taking it’s place on top of her. She felt herself take a step closer and his thumb slipped further beneath the fabric. 

\--

_ His fingers were rough, scraping against her skin as they trailed up and under her shirt, and she let out a little gasp at the feeling.  _

_ “Sorry,” he murmured. His head was dipped down, his hair falling into his face and blocking most of his eyes. What little she could see were focused down, at her neck where he’d just pulled away from. His face was flushed with heat. “Rough hands.” _

_ He made to press lighter, pulling his hands fractionally away from her skin, but she pressed into him, her hands falling over his own, keeping them how they were, hugging her hips tight.  _

_ “No,” she said, inching forward. Her legs were still crossed in front of her so she lifted on over, resting on the other side of his own knee, so she could scoot closer. “It’s good.” _

_ He smiled into her mouth at that, kissing her again and she shivered as his hands rubbed back and forth along the bare skin of her back.  _

\--

She straightened a little at the memory of his skin on hers and she turned her head away, watching the couples dance around them, hoping that her hair would fall and cover the blush that stained her cheeks. The pressure of his hand was suddenly far more weighted than it had been in the record store, holding her to him much closer than just palm to palm with an arm’s distance between them. 

She turned back to him to see a pained expression on his face. He was watching her with brows drawn together and his lips were in a flat line, pressing in on each other, leaving nothing but a white stip of skin where normally there were full pink lips. 

She reached their linked hands up and brushed her hair out of her face and he seemed to jolt back to reality, pulling away from her a bit. 

“What’s up?” She asked. 

He looked away from her, and she could feel his hands slipping out of hers, slowly, until there was none of his pressure left up against her at all. 

“Nothing,” he said, avoiding her eye. “I’m just uh--We should go check on the truck.”

“Oh,” Clarke said. She stepped away and felt a blanket of cold air fall over her. She felt like she stepped back three days with her one step, watching his face transform in front of her from the Bellamy she woke up to this morning to the one she ran into at a gas station. 

“Okay,” she started again. “I’ll go pay and meet you outside?”

He nodded and was gone, out the door, before she even grabbed her purse from the booth. 

She watched the couples shuffle around next to her, watched their feet at they moved back and forth in sync with one another, moving with music she couldn’t hear anymore over the ringing in her ears. She watched the patterns of their steps. 

One step forward, two steps back. 

***

His neck felt flushed all the way from the diner to the repair shop. 

He stretched his hand out at his side, fingers reaching away from each other, grasping at air, the moment he’d stepped out of the diner, but all he could feel was the soft skin at her ribs brushing up against his thumb and his palm, and he’d shoved his fists into his pockets. 

He felt like a jerk as he watched her face crumple in confusion as he nodded his head toward the shop and start walking over without her, but he felt like his lungs were a little to small every time he got within a hand's distance of her, so he pushed on, taking a big breath and feeling the cool air on his skin. 

Maybe it was nothing, he thought as they handed the keys to his truck back over to him as Clarke signed a check at the front of the shop. Maybe it was different for him, to be so close again, than it was for her. 

But suddenly, with her nose just inches from his in that diner, he couldn’t help but fall backwards, back to that hotel, on that squeaky mattress, with his hands, rough and worn and dingy, pressed into her skin, soft and smooth and fresh, and each press of his thumb against her took him away from where they were now.

He took a deep breath. 

“Ready?” he asked her.

***

_ Clarke had her feet propped up on the dashboard, one knee poking out of the open window. The breeze felt nice and cool, as the hot was air billowing into the truck from outside.  _

_ It was a small road, lots of trees around them and they hadn’t passed a building in just over ten minutes, but it was the good kind of quiet. The kind where you felt like you could get lost if you wanted to, just for a little while, and then walk right back out of, without disturbing anyone.  _

_ The radio was on but low, and she watched Bellamy’s fingers fiddle with the station before he landed on one, turning the volume up enough to just almost drown out his voice as he sang along.  _

_ She watched him out of the corner of her eye and she saw that smile, the wide open one that he usually tuned away to hide from her, but it was there, screaming at her, making all the colors a little sharper around her as she watched it stretch from his cheeks to his eyes.  _

_ “You must know this song,” he said turning to her. She let her hands fly up in surrender and he shakes his head at her in disbelief. “Clarke. This is the greatest song of all time.” _

_ He reached his hand back over to the volume knob and gave it a twist, filling the truck with the song, letting it, and his voice, spill out of the cracked windows, leaving a wake behind them. She felt a laugh bubble up in her belly and something bloom as he looked over at her.  _

_ There was something in the corner of her eye as he glanced over at her, meeting her gaze, smiling as he sang to her. It was a blur, she couldn’t tell what it was and she was distracted by the way he was dipping his head toward her, until it was too close and suddenly-- _

_ “Bellamy!” _

_ There was the blare of a horn and she watched as his hands jerk to the side, ripping the wheel and them off to the right, as they floundered in the air from the impact of the van at their side. The tires kept rolling, slowing on their own until they slipped slowly into a tree, halting and lurching forward at the contact.  _

_ She looked over to her side, and his head was dipped down over the steering wheel, the iron tight grasp his hands had on it loosened, his knuckles warm and tan instead of gripped white.  _

_ “Hey,” she said, her hand reaching over and touching his head. She peeled her fingers back, stained red at the tips and she had to bite down on her own lip to keep from crying out. She unbuckled her seatbelt and shifted over, lifting his head in her hands. She brushed the hair out of his face, but when she looked down it wasn’t Bellamy’s head in her hands it was-- _

“Dad!” 

Clarke gasped as she woke up, her head knocking into the window as she jerked upright. 

“Clarke?”

Bellamy’s eyes were wide, concerned as he flicked back and forth between watching her and the road. She felt a pressure on her shoulder and she looked down to see Bellamy’s hand wrapped around it, tight, squeezing, making sure she was still with him. 

She shook her head. She couldn’t breathe.

“Clarke,” he said again, concern growing in his voice. 

It felt like icy needles were pricking into her lungs. Her vision started to blur. She shook her head again, it was all she could do was shake,  _ no no no no. _

“Clarke, hey,” he said, stern. “Open your eyes.”

“Pull over,” she gasped out. “Pull the car over now.”

The tires bounced against rocks and divots as he flicked his blinker on and pulled over to the side, slowly, stopping once they were fully parked in the shoulder. He didn’t wait for her to say anything, he yanked the keys out of the ignition and hopped out, walking over to her side of the truck. 

When he reached it he pulled her door open and reached over to unbuckle her seatbelt. He dragged his hands along her sides, pulling her legs so they were dangling out of the doorway and she was facing the outside. 

Her lungs felt a little bigger. 

“Clarke,” he started but she shook her head. 

She felt herself slip out of her seat, her feet landing on the ground, feeling like her legs were shaking and spinning, like everything around her was shaking and spinning, but in a way that made her own shaking and spinning twice as worse instead of cancelling out. 

She leaned against the side of the truck so she didn’t have to worry about standing anymore. She let her breath glide out of her, slowly, like she wasn’t sure she was going to be able to get it all back, but with her lungs so small and tight she didn’t have room for the amount she was trying to hold. 

He inched closer to her, his hand reaching out tentatively and she looked up at him, just trying to breathe. His face was scared, unsure and she felt herself dip out of his grasp. 

Exposed. That’s how she felt. Like she was standing naked in a field, with strangers in a circle ten feet away from her, watching, waiting for her to snap while they stood by and watched the naked freak in the field. 

_ It wasn’t real _ , she tried to tell herself. She hadn’t been in the car when he died. She hadn’t even known about it until afterward. It wasn’t real. 

It didn’t help and her breath got quick again and she watched as her breathing quickened, watched as Bellamy looked farther and farther away from her, nervous, not knowing what was wrong with her, not knowing how to make it better, or if he was just going to set her off. 

She wanted to run. Run away from it all again, leave everything, including him, including  _ her, _ behind. 

It was  enough that she didn’t know what to do to make it better for herself but to watch him flounder next to her, this guy she barely knew, who she’d somehow convinced herself she should stick with, even though he didn’t know her, even though he barely liked her, it was too much. 

He was fucked up enough without her laying everything all on him. Again. They saw where that got them the last time. 

Him, with his shirt and his shoes pulled halfway on as he was sprinting out of the door, away from the mess she’d made of what was already a mess too big to clean up. 

His hand grazed her shoulder and she jumped back away from it. She didn’t want that to happen again. 

“Clarke--”

“I’m fine,” she snapped. “Don’t worry, I don’t need you to fuck me again.”

Her skin prickled as she said the words, knowing they were harsh, but she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t stand there and pretend she wasn’t leaving a trail of disasters at every pit stop, and if she could stop it at this one, then she was going to. 

She pulled her door back open and hopped back into the truck, slamming the door shut before Bellamy could say anything else.She watched the wind blow the trees ahead of them through the windshield instead of watching his face fall and crumple in confusion on the other side of her door.

***

It felt like a bad dream for a moment. Or a joke. 

He was sure Clarke was going to pop her head out of the door any moment and tell him she was kidding, that she didn’t mean it. Tell him that it wasn’t his touch on her shoulder that made her flinch away. That she didn’t spit at him for fucking her in the same day he felt the memory of her skin wash over him uncontrollably. 

It pulled him back. Back into the  _ what the fuck are you doing _ pocket of his mind that he’d been managing to avoid all day.  Then her door slammed and his veins were filled with ice. 

It was too much. He shouldn’t have left home. He should have dropped Octavia off and gone home. Gone back to work instead of blowing his money on a roadtrip where he ruined every leg of the journey by being exactly like his mother. 

Just doing whatever the hell he wanted, hurting the people around him without even knowing it. 

He felt guilt shake his bones and then he looked into the window where she was staring straight ahead, watching the road with stone eye and he couldn’t take it anymore.

His foot was crashing into the metal of the truck before he knew he’d made the decision to move. Once, twice, three times and his foot was aching so he stomped back over to his side of the truck and fell in. 

He dropped the keys into the cup holder in front of the radio, and instead of buckling, he twisted to face her. 

“Okay, look--” he started but she shook her head. 

“No, don’t, Bellamy--”

“No,” he said cutting her off right back. “We’re gonna fucking talk about this now, alright? Because we’ve been avoiding it and clearly that’s not going to work anymore.”

She was quiet as he said that, her head ducked down, her eyes refusing to meet his, but she was quiet so he carried on. 

“I get it,” his voice was softer than he wanted. Too open, too easy to read. But it was out there and he couldn’t change it. “Okay? I’m a way to keep busy. That’s all I am. A taxi to help take you away, distract you from your life--which you’ve told me basically nothing about, by the way, so you can’t get mad when I don’t have more than that to go on.”

She startled at that, looking at him with wide, red eyes, but he kept going before she could cut in.

“You’re taking a trip, but I’m grasping at straws here. It’s different, alright? Because at the end of all of this, you get to go back to your friends and your fancy school, and I’m still some nobody in a pick-up truck.”

“Bellamy,” she reached her hand out, resting over one of his lightly and he felt his whole body light up in flames. He knew she was about to apologize. He could feel it in the touch of her palm against his fingers, in the way she said his name.

But he didn’t want to hear it. He didn’t want hear her say sorry for him knowing the truth about who they were and where they stood. They could pretend all they wanted in diners and bookshops and record stores, but at soon as it was just them and the air between them, he knew exactly where he stood and he couldn’t bear to hear her apologize for it. 

“Look,” he said, lifting their hands. “That’s where it all is.” 

Her hand was soft and clean, her fingernails polished, not a scratch on her palm, not on any fingers. 

“I’ve had these callouses on my hands for two years. These grease stains?” His nails were dark and gritty while hers were fresh and clean. “They’re probably never going to go away. That’s who I am Clarke. We both know it.” He gave her hand a squeeze before dropping it into her lap. “We both know who you are too.”

“Bellamy, I’m--”

He shook his head as he turned the key in the ignition. “It’s fine, Clarke.” He pulled back out onto the road, stones and pebbles jumping up from the tires to smack the bottom of his truck. “Don’t worry about it.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> only one more to go!! i'm pretty sure the next chapter is going to be pretty lengthy so forgive me if it takes a while--i'm on break right now for a week but i'm going back to school soon and this semester is crazy!
> 
> but please leave comments here or come see me on tumblr (ofhobbitsandwomen) to talk about this au or any other au or any headcanons you may have!
> 
> thank you for reading <3


	5. Chapter 5

He didn’t turn the radio back on when he flicked the turn signal on and pulled back onto the road. He didn’t ask her to chose a tape for him, even though it was his turn. And he didn’t say anything more. Occasionally he glanced over in her direction and she thought maybe he was looking at her, but he was just checking the mirror on the door beside her. 

She tried to ignore the cold shiver that went down her spine every time she hoped that maybe, just maybe he was looking at her, and he wasn’t. 

_ I’m a way to keep busy. _

_ I’m still some nobody in a pick-up truck. _

_ That’s who I am Clarke. We both know it. _

His words were rolling around and around in her head and she couldn’t breathe at the thought that she’d made him feel like that. This man, this soft, broken boy beside her, who’d watched her flounder at a gas station, looking for somewhere to go--somewhere other than the bus stop she’d just walked away from--and taken her in. The guy who let her cry and spit and rage beside him, who let her hold him and touch him and be touched, just to forget, and he thought he was nobody. 

And she made him think like that. 

It was too much to bear when he showed her his hands, held them up in hers, not to touch her, not to be close to her, but to let her know exactly why they never would be. 

And she let him think that’s what it all was. 

He was infuriating and a grouch, but she’d been drowning in three inches of water and he’d flipped her around so she could breathe. 

She kept watching him out of the corner of her eye, watching as he pulled his bottom lip between his teeth, gnawing at it instead of talking to her, watched as his knuckles turned white, gripping the steering wheel hard, then loosening again, his fingers stretching out while his thumbs stayed hooked on the wheel. He kept his eyes steady and forward, his face schooled into indifference, but a careful indifference, one there just for her. 

_ It’s fine, Clarke _ , he’d said.  _ Don’t worry about it.  _

Unable to sit with the silence washing over her, Clarke reached down to her bag at her feet and pulled out her sketchbook. She flipped the pages between her fingers, glimpses of each sketch jumping out at her. A few of her dad, from pictures in the house. One of her mom, smiling at her, eyes still full of sadness, but laughing with her back pressed to the washing machine, her feet, bare and thin sticking out in front of her. A few of the truck, with it’s chipped paint and crooked mirror. One of the lake. 

And Bellamy. 

Over and over and over again. Scattered in the pages, between sketches of coffee mugs and muffins and wide stretches of road. His face, his eyes, his hands. One of a stray curl falling over his forehead, over his eyebrow, poking at his eye. One of his tongue slipping out wetting his lips, like he did every time he turned the wheel or changed the lane. One of him bent over the box of tapes, fingers touching the labels, picking which one to play next. 

Over and over, he was there in the pages. 

Her breath caught in her throat.  _ Idiot _ , she thought.  _ You stupid, stupid girl _ . 

There it was, covering nearly every page and she hadn’t even noticed it. 

Of course that’s what it all was. Even from the beginning. The jealousy at the bar when the waitress flirted with him, the heat of her skin every time she thought about his hands on her, the wholeness she felt when he joked with her, when he smiled at her, when she caught a glimpse of happiness in his eyes, from her. 

Of  _ course _ that’s what it was. 

She wanted to let her head fall against the window with a thud, to close her eyes and slip into the seat until there wasn’t a difference between her and the old worn fabric beneath her legs, to slip into nothing for being so slow. 

Instead she flipped to a clean page and watched the stroke of the charcoal darken it. 

The noise filled the fragile air, the scratching of the tip against the page in hard and fast strokes, or smooth long waves, back and forth and back and forth until it all faded into the background again. It folded into the humming of the engine and the roll of the tires over the gravel, and soon she felt the silence wash over them again, without the pressing weight of before. 

She didn’t notice him pull into a rest stop until the car was parked and she heard the twist of him pulling the key out of the ignition. 

“I’m hungry,” he said at her questioning glance. He hesitated for a moment, but caught her eye. “Want anything?”

She nodded, reaching down to rifle through her bag, searching for the wallet at the bottom. She pulled it out, and grabbed a few bills, handing them over to him. 

“Get whatever you want,” she said. “Just grab a bag of potato chips, alright?”

He twisted his lips to the side, like he wanted to say something, but he just nodded and didn’t ask her to go in with him. He slipped the bills into his pocket and pressed the door shut, walking away from the truck with his hands shoved in his pockets and his shoulders tense. 

It didn’t surprise her when she looked down at her sketchpad and found his hands, dark and dirty, gripping into her legs on the page. She’d drawn his fingers pressing into the soft skin on her thighs, just like he’d done a few nights ago, with his thumbs looping down toward the mattress below her, hooking them around not to lose his grip. 

She sighed as she kept shading, wondering if this would be another one she kept tucked in her sketchpad, just for her. One to look back on when all this was over, when they back where they started in different cities. Strangers. It seemed wrong that they were ever strangers, and worse that soon that’s all they would be again. Like a sharp poke to the gut with a piping hot stick every time she thought of it. 

She jumped at the sound of the driver’s side door slamming as Bellamy slid in next to her, dropping a bag of chips in her lap, a bottle of Coke between his fingers. She reached down to grab the bag, her hands stained dark from rubbing against her drawing. The entire side of her left pinky covered in grey, the tips of her fingers all tinted. 

“Hey,” she said, reaching her hand over. She caught his eye and smiled when he looked over at her, trying to keep it light. “Look.” she held her stained hands over his. “Not so different.”

A soft, sad smile played over his face, his eyes giving him away. He shook his head. 

“You really, really don’t get it.”

She felt a burst of heat bubble up in her chest. A desperate, angry wave warming her skin because he was so damn stubborn that he’d rather stay broken and distant from her than just reach out and grab the olive branch she was handing him. That he was practically thrusting over to him, saying  _ let me fix this I promise I won’t break it again _ , and he’d rather stay cracked and fragile. 

“Right,” she said, sitting back in her seat. She ripped the bag open and shoved a few chops in her mouth. “Right, I forgot. You’re just a taxi and I’m just a way for you to make some quick cash.”

She was doing it again. Poking. Prickling. Working him up. And she could see it was working. She could see the red flush working it’s way over his cheeks, steam practically spilling out of his ears as he tried to keep his face schooled and calm. 

“You want me to apologize for that?” His voice was thin and sharp. Unforgiving. “For taking the chance to  _ make some quick cash _ after I’ve had to spend 7 grand a year on AZT to watch my mom die slower? And still have to find money to put my sister through college? You want me to feel bad about taking an opportunity?”

She felt her mouth snap shut. 

There was nothing, nothing she could say to something like that. How could she ever find a way to apologize for it all? For everything he’d been through, everything that brought him to her, and everything she’d caused between them since they’d met?

And yet. 

Some small, selfish part of her felt a sharp poke between her ribs because he hadn’t even bothered denying the fact that all she was to him was a way to make some quick cash. 

She heard him sigh. 

“The guy in the shop said there was a motel up the road,” he said. “Let’s just stop for the night.”

***

They’d gotten into a routine somehow, in the few days they’d been together. 

He watched as Clarke slipped out of the truck before him, walking right into the main building. There was a poster over the window, some ad from a local shop blocking his view of her face, but he watched her hand stretch across the counter and hand over her credit card, and a hand reach toward hers with a key. 

He’d just gotten out of the car, his bag slung over his shoulder and hers resting in the bed of the truck beside him, when she came out of the office. 

“Room six,” she said, pulling her bag out of the truck, brushing against his hip before she propped it over her shoulder. 

The room was small. There was one little window, on the same wall as the door, so frosted over and stained that the only thing you could see out of it was a blur of shapes and shadows as they moved by the room. He scuffed his feet against the yellowing carpet and tried to ignore the big brown stains splattered over it a few feet in front of them. 

It was the bed though, that made them pause as they stepped in the room. The one bed in the center of the room. It had a dark blue quilt thrown over it and four sad looking, limp pillows at the head of it. 

It was big enough for the two of them but only just, and unless they stuck themselves on the edges of the mattress, their sides lining up with the sides of the mattress, hoping they wouldn’t tip off in the night, there would be no room for space between them.

Clarke dropped her bag on the ground with a thud, startling him out of his thoughts. 

“I’m gonna go take a shower.” She raised an eyebrow at him. “You planning on taking one tonight? I’ll go quick.”

He shook his head. 

“No,” he said. “Take your time, I’ll take one in the morning.”

He heard the sound of her feet padding across the floor and the click of the bathroom door as she pulled it closed behind her, and he waited until he could hear the sound of the water running before moving, sighing as he flopped down onto the bed. 

He toed his boots off his feet as he laid there, wondering if he should wait for her to come out to talk again, to offer to sleep on the floor, or something, or if he should just buck up and slide into his side of the mattress. 

A few minutes passed without decision, and then he grit his teeth and dug through his bag for a pair of sweatpants to pull on before he decided to just bite the bullet and climb into the bed and under the covers, pressing himself the furthest he could to the side, drawing a thick line in the mattress for his side and hers. 

It had been back and forth all day in his head. High, moving higher and higher up and crashing back down. Flopping back and forth between angry and frustrated and hopeful, but he was tired. She was going to come out of that bathroom and slip under the covers next to him, an inch of quiet, fragile air between them and he was going to have to make a decision. 

There was an itch between his ribs, a niggling worry that even after all of it, everything that had happened in the past few days, she was counting the moments down until they reached San Francisco so she could leave him. Like the marker of the city was all it was going to take for her to hop out of the truck with a wave and be on her way, a memory, a ghost in his mind he’d probably never shake, one he’d definitely never understand. 

He squeezed his eyes shut as he realized that it wasn’t worry digging into his chest. It was fear. Not all consuming, not crippling, just there. Annoyingly present in every breath he took in putting off talking to her, growing every time he forced himself to avoid her eye. 

He wasn’t sure what was going to happen when she finally did leave. And the clock was ticking down, shaking him as he realized that he hadn’t even told her yet that he was happy, in some weird twisted way that she’d stumbled across him, kicking his truck in that gas station. That in the few days they’d spent together he’d felt the steadiest he had in years, like his head was finally getting clear and his legs were solidly on the ground. 

An odd steadying force, wobbling with every wall they put up, every mask they plastered on each morning, but one that was there as much as she could be. Better than most of the people from home who watched him and his life happen and fall apart around him. 

When he wasn’t crying or yelling he felt calm, something he hadn’t felt in years, and that in itself was a miracle, one he thought might be exclusive to the slippery days on the road. He’d nearly half forgotten that he’d never be anybody so long as he was Bellamy Blake. 

He should probably thank her for that, and instead he’d spent the whole trip fucking it up. 

His eyes were still shut when the bathroom door creaked open and she shuffled into the bed beside him, the mattress dipping enough that his left shoulder slipped closer to her as his side tilted downwards.

He let his eyes flutter open as her hands, scrubbed red and raw and clean in the shower, reached down to pull the covers up and over herself. He sucked in a breath and she moved to hide them under the covers but he reached a hand of his own out to grab one of hers before she did. 

“Shouldn’t have said what I did,” he whispered. He turned on his side, facing her while his hand still rubbed softly over hers. 

She was looking at him with soft sad eyes, and he knew that even if someday they could see each other again, he wouldn’t deserve to. 

“No,” she shook her head. “You had every right to say it. I was so, so out of line today.”

“Maybe I had every right,” he said, testing the waters. “But I didn’t have to be such a dick about it.”

She coughed out a laugh at that, her fingers wrapping around his hand. 

“It’s not an excuse,” he carried on. Might as well get it all out now. “But I’ve always had to be a dick to get people to listen to me. With my mom’s health and all I was constantly the bad guy, making a scene until somebody helped us out. I couldn’t really do it any other way, and I had to have them--my mom and O--taken care of.”

She was closer to him than when she’d slipped under the covers, he felt one of her knees bump his. 

“And I hear you say things like how you might not go back to school and it just reminds me how different we are. It puts another link in the chain between us because you’ve got all these opportunities and that’s what’s scaring you.” He felt his face flush and he tried to ignore the way her eyes widened the longer he went on. If he didn’t say it now he never would, and she deserved to at least know something of the truth. 

Even if it wasn’t everything. 

“But I’m…” he shook his head. “I’m nobody. I’ve got nothing. And I’m never going to be able to be anybody else if I go back to Ark, but I’ve got nowhere else to go.”

It’s not an apology, which is what she deserves, but the words make his ribs widen and let his lungs expand like he can finally breathe. Because even if she hates him and is counting down the minutes until they get to San Francisco so she can leave him, at least he finally said it all, out loud. It was out there now, and he couldn’t take it back so now he just had to deal with it. For better or for worse. And there was only forward. 

\---

“It doesn’t matter,” Clarke whispered. “What you said before. We both said things we didn’t mean today.” 

He nodded, watching her. She kept her eyes fixed on him, making sure that he was watching, that he heard her. It had been a mess of a day and it was time to try and clean it up.

“You picked me up,” she shrugged. “A stranger at a gas station with a ridiculous proposition that would have had anyone else calling the cops and you barely even thought twice about it.” 

She knew he was about to protest, she could see his eyebrows scrunching together and his mouth opening but she didn’t leave a space for it. 

“I couldn’t do anything in my own life that didn’t make me feel like screaming and you gave me an out, and even if we’ve fought half the time--or more than half the time,” she added at his smirk. “I’m not stuck and I’m not numb and I’m done screaming.”

“Clarke--”

“You looked after me,” she said simply. “Even when we barely knew each other. You made sure I called someone from home. You made sure we ate. It might be second nature for you but it’s not nothing. And neither are you.”

How many days had it been? Three? Four? She wasn’t sure anymore. It was all waves in her head cycles of highs and lows on the road and in motels, and the actual days had blurred together, all in the shape of him, the guy in front of her who’d given her a glimpse at something she’d never seen in life before now.

She pushed herself forward on the bed and reached her free hand out to grab at his other. She loves his hands. Wide and rough and dark, stained from years of work, but light whenever he touched her. They were her favorite. He wasn’t expressive in his face, hardened and blocked away from anything that might give away too much in his eyes or his smile or his voice. 

He was expressive in his hands. They way they looked casually forced at his sides whenever he was uncomfortable, or clenched together, behind his back when he didn’t want to let anything show. They’d drum on his leg or a table when he was lost in thought or antsy. They did the talking for him, most of the time, even when they were stuffed away in his pockets. 

She loved his hands. 

And she loved the way they were pulling her toward him, one slipping out of her grasp to run its way up her arm and behind her neck, playing with the hair back before moving down, skimming across the top of her spine and shoulders. Her sleep shirt was thin, nearly threadbare and she could feel every callous in his palm moving against the fabric, barely pressing into her skin. 

She started thinking of the other night, when she pulled him on top of her, when he found her crying in that hotel room and when he left moments after they’d finished, barely pulling his boots on before he was out the door. She remembered the way his hands felt then, tough pressing against her. Different than they did now, worn and rough still, but warm. 

How many days since then? A month? A year? Just a moment? The memories flooded her in waves, dipping her in and out of where she was, pressed nearly into his chest on the bed with his hand slowly working over her back and she couldn’t stop the smile that worked it’s way on to her face when she realized how different she felt with him now. 

He’d propped himself up on his elbow, slightly above her so he could move his other hand into her hair as his right hand stroked down her spine. She felt herself turning, her neck pressing back into the pillows and her back trapping his hand between her shirt and the mattress. She watched him as he leaned down, his bottom lip between his teeth and his eyes wide and searching, closer and closer to her with every breath. 

“I don’t want to keep busy,” she found herself whispering before anything happened. He pulled back up, a smile on his face. His eyes washed over her face, leaving stains of red wherever they touched.  _ Different _ , she thought, _ so so different from the last time _ . 

“I’ve been busy the last five years,” he said. It wasn’t sad any longer. He was watching her, his eyes smiling, his hands working around her to move them closer. “This is different.”

He waited, hesitant until she nodded and smiled back at him, before he finally leaned all the way down to kiss her. His lips pressed lightly against hers,  and when she arched her back, pushing up into him, she felt him smile against her. 

Bellamy shifted, wrapping his arms around her as he framed her hips with his knees. He paused as his weight settled above her. 

“You good?” He asked. 

She nodded, her hands twisting into the fabric of his undershirt. “Yeah,” she said smiling. “I’m good.” 

She pulled him back down, his chest bumping into hers as the force of it all caused his knees to slip out from under him. She felt him shift around, trying to make her more comfortable, but she just laughed into his mouth, her hands working their way around to his back. His shoulders drooped, relaxed as her fingers curled under the hem of his shirt, flattening against the warm skin of his back. 

She pressed her hands into the hard muscles of his back, squeezing as he worked his mouth from hers to her neck, nibbling behind her ear before moving down, down, further until she felt his tongue slip out against her collarbone, then further and further as she arched her back, pressing into his touch. 

The fabric of his shirt bunched above her wrists and she moved her hands over across his back and up until it was shoved up under his armpits. She poked at it, nudging at it until he got the hint and shifted himself, straightening up so he could pull it over his head.

His hair was pushed away from his forehead, sticking up at every angle. His lips were red and swollen but smiling down at her between flushed cheeks as he grabbed at the bottom of his shirt to lift it up and over his head. He dropped it to the floor, leaning back down but not all the way. 

Pushing her hair slowly off her face he bent forward propping himself up on one arm, his elbow brushing against her side, as he used his other hand to rub at her belly, slipping under the thin fabric of her shirt, causing a chill to run down her spine as the rough pads of his fingers danced across her skin. 

She felt heat pool low in her belly and she forced herself to stay still as his hand explored, stretching over every part of her torso, covering her stomach with the tips of his fingers brushing at her ribs, before reaching up toward her breasts, and she felt a hard, shallow breath force itself out of her lungs. A small laugh spilled from Bellamy’s lips, shaking against her stomach, warming the dip below her belly button. 

She had to wriggle beneath him to get her shirt in her hands enough to tip her chest forward and pull it over her head, loose strands of hair falling over her forehead as she did. His fingers tucked them back behind her ear, and she wondered how it took them so long to get here. 

His eyes were wide as they looked at her and she wondered if he was thinking the same thing. She grabbed hold of his hand which had stilled on her ribs, and moved it up, back toward her breast, as she tipped forward, leaning her face toward his as they sat upright. 

“Still good?” she asked, whispering against his lips. 

He nodded, pulling her tighter. He wrapped his free arm around her back and hoisted her up so she was sitting in his lap.

“Yeah,” he breathed. “Still good.”

***

Bellamy woke up the next morning wrapped around her. Her legs tangled in his, warm and sticky from sweat and sleep, his arm aching from the awkward position it was in all night. His nose was pressed into the back of her neck and he started kissing down it as he pulled his arm out from underneath her, her shoulders rising and falling with her slow breaths. 

There was a small, prickling worry in his ribs that he couldn’t seem to get rid of, but he pushed it aside, just for the moment to stretch back against the pillows as Clarke shifted beside him, turning, her face bumping into the arm he stretched out behind his head. 

He’d closed his eyes again, but stayed awake, as she let out a long slow breath and pulled her legs back over to her side of the mattress. When he peeled his eyes open, she was watching him with soft, sleep lidded eyes. A small smile played at the corner of her mouth, but she didn’t say anything, just let her eyes roam back and forth across him. 

Her cheeks were red stained and she wouldn’t quite meet his eyes. 

He knocked a knee against her, forcing her to look at him. “Stop freaking out,” he said softly.

“I’m not freaking out.” She kicked back at him playfully. “Don’t project your feelings onto me.”

“Hey, I’m not freaking out either.”

She pursed her lips and nodded at that, like she didn’t believe him, like she guessed he didn’t even believe him, but wanted to. He let one of his hands reach out toward the wild, starchy hair spread over her neck and shoulder. His fingers padded against her skin as he brushed it off her neck and let his hand rest there, running back and forth across her shoulder slowly. She smiled. 

“So,” she said, scooting forward so her arms were up against his side. “If you’re not freaking out, then…”

He raised an eyebrow at her. 

“Then,” she continued. “You’re feeling...good?”

_ Not quite _ , he thought.  _ Good’s not quite enough _ . More like settled. Rested. Whole. Like some strange sort of peace had washed over him, one he hadn’t felt in a long, long time. 

“How are you feeling?” he asked instead. 

She squirmed around, avoiding his eye. He heard her mumble something that sounded like  _ I asked you first, jerk _ , but when he leaned down to ask her to repeat it, she just shook her head. 

“I feel...ready,” she said. She looked at him with a playful glimmer in her eye. “Ready to start the day.”

“Fuck, I’m not,” he said, reaching his arm around her back. He pulled her closer, pressing his fingers into her sides, testing the waters. She wriggled in closer to him laughing. 

She waited a few moments to say anything else. The two of them laid there, not quite wrapped up in each other, but wrapped up near each other, the weight of their breaths and the feel of their laughter spilling over and covering them both. 

It was strange and warm and welcome, and Bellamy, just this once, let himself believe that this was supposed to happen to him. 

“Hey,” she pressed her hand into his chest, and he felt a spark bloom under her touch. “I slept really well last night.” She said it like it was a surprise, like she was just realizing it herself. 

“Yeah,” he nodded. “Me too. Except, you know, for the snoring.”

“Oh fuck off,” she said. “We were having a moment. And I do not snore.”

“How could you possibly know that?” he teased. “You’re asleep every time it happens.”

She rolled her eyes at him, pressing a soft kiss into his shoulder. Then she was kicking off the remaining covers from her feet and jumping off the bed. 

“C’mon,” she said, grabbing a shirt from the floor and pulling it on. From the looks of it, it was the worn gray t-shirt he’d pulled off last night. It fell soft and loose against her body, better on her than it ever looked on him. “We’re burning daylight here.”

***

He walked down to a cafe around the corner from the motel and picked up a couple of coffees for them as she finished checking them out of their room. He had a cup in each hand and packets of cream and sugar in his pockets because he hadn’t thought to ask her how she takes her coffee, and he couldn’t remember from the diners they’d stopped in before. 

She was outside the office, leaning against the truck when he got back, her hair piled on top of her head in a bun, her face tilted up toward the sky. She was wearing big round sunglasses, even though the sun was hidden behind the pink blanket of the morning sky, and he could see her eyes pressed closed beneath the lenses. 

“Here,” he said, clearing his throat as he walked up to her. He handed her one of the cups, and dug around in his jacket pocket to pull out the sugars. ‘Wasn’t sure how you took it.”

“Cream and two sugars please,” she said, taking it with a smile. She set the cup on the hood of the car to peel the lid off and pour in the cream and sugar, before stirring it around with her pinkie finger. She licked the coffee off her finger with a pop, before smashing the lid back on and taking a sip. 

“Oh my god,” she said. “This coffee is actually good.”

He pouted at her. “Give me some credit, come on.”

“Sorry, yeah of course. Well done and all that.” She patted the hood of the truck. “Ready?”

The sun was still low in the sky as they set off on the road, peaking over the horizon, creeping up further with each sip of the coffee they took, and each mile of the long grey road they passed. There wasn’t much longer until they got to San Francisco, one long stretch of the highway, just a few hours and they were there. 

It hung heavy in the car, the knowledge that they’d set a goal, and now, so soon after realizing what meeting it meant, they’d be passing it by, having to make a new plan once they got there. 

Clarke was quiet for the first chunk of it. Sipping her coffee, smiling over at him, laughing when he caught her eye. She’d taken over control of the radio, ignoring the rolling of his eyes whenever she picked something he wished he’d never have to hear again, but his protests were lost, drowned out when she started singing along. 

It went on like that, the sun rising in the sky, the light flashing off her skin, Clarke’s head bobbing back and forth beside him. It was hard to look straight ahead, to watch the yellow lines zip under the tires when she was close and so open and warm in a way she hadn’t been before. He wanted to reach out and touch her and make sure it all wasn’t some weird, horribly real dream teasing him before he woke up. 

It was quiet, but the air was soft between them. He smiled, tucking it into the corner of his cheeks, keeping it to himself, as he breathed it in. 

“Need me to drive?” Clarke asked, glancing over at him. Her left leg was pulled up onto the seat, bent with her knee poking at his thigh. 

“Nah,” he said, shaking his head. He pushed his right leg over and felt her knee press into him. “I’m good.”

***

They went to the Muir Overlook before crossing the line into the city. 

It was foggy when they pulled the truck into the lot, thick grey clouds covering the steps of the path walking them out toward the water. They could see a few feet in front of them, nothing more, until they got to the end of it, and Clarke pulled him forward by the hand, leaning her body over the gate that surrounded it, her belly pressing into the metal. 

“Holy shit,” he breathed. With the fog swirling around him, mixing into the water below them, blurring the greens and blues and yellows of the world into one overwhelming color in front of him. 

Clarke nodded beside him. 

“Yeah,” she said. She sounded out of breath. He looked over and watched her knuckles grip tighter around the sketchbook clenched between her fists. Her eyes were fixed in the sight before them, determined, looking away from him. 

“It’s not the edge of the world,” he said, pulling her closer into him. He rested his hand over the fist wrapped around the book. “But it feels like the edge of something.”

She shook against his side and he looked down, expecting to see anything but her shoulders bouncing in laughter, eyes bright as they looked up at him. 

“What?” he asked. 

“Nothing.” She brushed the hair out of her face. “I think my dad would have liked you, that’s all.” Her voice got shaky as she carried on. “I brought this out to draw something here, this was always somewhere he wanted to go, but I really, really don’t think I can.”

It was too much, he could see that. Her dad was there and not there, and it was too much to process. She’d be drawing for him but he’d never see it. She was doing something he always wanted, but he wasn’t there. Her dad, if he could see her, would be proud she’d gotten there, and horrified at how. 

It’s not something he could fix, not even something he could make better, so Bellamy just reached his arm around her and brushed her hair out of her face. 

“Did you ever go on picnics as a kid?” he asked her, her head falling down to rest against him. He could feel her shake her head, her nose pressing into his chest. “They’re fucking terrible.”

She coughed out a laugh and he had to press his own smile down to keep going. 

“No, really,” he said. “Just awful.” He felt her arm wrap around him as he spoke. “My mom used to take us on picnics, when we were little. Before things got bad. And we were always excited. She’d pack a huge basket, and we’d carry it down through the neighborhood to the park a few blocks away, and we’d set it up there.”

The sun was beaming down then, clearing the fog, warming their skin. He let his eyes slip closed as he watched himself, eight years old, trudging down the road with a giant basket, Octavia behind him wearing the blanket like a cape. 

“But then we’d realize that all the food in the basket was the leftovers none of us had wanted to eat all week and we’d sit there picking at it, starving because we’d skipped breakfast to get ready for the picnic, and thirsty as all hell from the walk over. And when we wouldn’t eat it, the ants would. And the flies. And suddenly we were grumpy and sweaty and starving, being eaten alive by bugs, and the worst part was we had to carry it all back and pretend like we had a really good time.” He shook his head softly. “And we never stopped going on those fucking picnics. Ever. And they were always terrible.”

Her laugh was thin and worn but warm against him. Her grip on his hips felt a little tighter. 

“How do you feel,” she started. “Right now. Thinking of her.”

“Angry,” he said without thinking. “And sad, obviously. She was my mom. But there are parts of me that will never not resent her for what she made us go through--what she’s making us go through still. And always. She fucked up once for her, but it’s every day for us now that we have to deal with it.”

He shook his head, his chest aching in a way he couldn’t really understand. 

“I guess I miss her and I wish that I didn’t.” Clarke’s face was stone watching him, her hand like honey out in th sun as it reached up to brush his hair out of his face like he’d done for her just a minute ago. “I want to call her. Or hug her. Something.”

The silence washed over them after that, Clarke’s eyes roaming, her mind working a million miles minute, he was sure. He stood there, slotted into her side watching the sky shift in front of them until it was all he could think of. The wind, the water, the press of her side against his. 

“Is there a payphone around?” Clarke broke the silence. 

“C’mon,” he said, peeling himself off of her and pulling her back up the path by her hand. “Let’s have a look around, see if we can find one.”

***

She wanted to hug her mom too. 

The whole time she’d been thinking of her dad and how she’d never get to call him or hug him or see him again, and the whole time she’d been ignoring her mother. 

She thought back to his wake, back to sitting with her mom, their backs pressed against the machines in the laundry room. Did she hug her that day?

The phone rang twice before her mom’s voice called out on the other end.

“Hello?”

She took a breath. Her lungs felt shaky. “Mom?”

“Clarke?” 

“Yeah, hi. “ She thought she heard a sniff on the other line. “How are you?”

There was a long pause. Clarke could hear the phone drop down from her mom’s ear, scuffing against her shirt for a moment, scratching in her her before bringing the receiver back up to speak. 

“I’m okay, Clarke,” she said. “How are you?”

She laughed. A short, watery laugh that she couldn’t help. She heard her mom sniff again. 

“I’m okay, I just…” she trailed off, not knowing what to say. “I’m in San Francisco. Well, almost. I’m at the Muir Overlook.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Clarke said. “Dad would have loved it here.”

“Mmm,” her mom hummed. 

“I just,” Clarke sighed. “I love you mom. We spent so long talking about how we love dad and how we were worried about each other missing dad. And I didn’t realize until now that we might have forgotten to say we love each other and might miss each other too. So I love you, mom. I miss you.”

Her mom was crying. She was trying to mask it, muffling it through her shirt, Clarke was sure, just like she’d seen her do so many times before. But she knew it. She could practically see her.

“I love you too Clarke.”

She let the quiet fold over her for a moment, the static on the phone line pulling her away from the mountains and trees and water, pulling her back home, back to her mom and her room, a blanket tucked up around her as her mom kissed her forehead goodnight. 

“How long are you staying in San Francisco?” Her mom’s voice was small and tinny. 

“I’m not sure,” Clarke said. She hadn’t let herself think about it yet. Not long, she knew. She couldn't stay too long.

She thought of Bellamy going back to Ark, on his own, back to a shop job he never really wanted, a stack of books he never had time to read. She thought of her apartment, her room, empty and waiting for her to come back, her school, with a spot left reserved just for her. And as long as it was hers it couldn’t be anyone else’s. 

“I’ll be home soon,” she promised. “I don’t know when exactly. But I’ll be better about calling. I should have called you before I left.”

“It’s okay, Clarke,” her mom whispered. “I’m just happy to hear from you.”

“Love you, mom.”

“Love you too, Clarke. Be safe.”

***

Her mom’s voice rang through her head all throughout the rest of the day. They stopped at a little cafe for dinner and she heard her mom,  _ I love you, be safe, it’s okay, how long _ , over and over again in her head, when they walked through the doors, when they picked their table, when they ordered their drinks. She was slipping away, back to where she started from and she could see that Bellamy was noticing. 

“You alright?” he asked, picking at the food on his plate. 

“Yeah,” she said. She shook her head, trying to break out of it and push herself back there, at the table across from him. “Yeah, sorry. Just got caught up in my head I guess.”

He nodded, chewing on a fry. She swiped a few from his plate and he stuck his tongue out at her but she could feel his foot brush up against hers under the table. 

All at once she felt a wave crash over her. This boy, this caring man in front of her, who had been looking out for her even when she made him feel small, was sitting across from her with no final destination in his mind. No plan to move on to something else. It made her heart sink, imagining him going back to a town that held him back, thinking he was only good for helping his sister, that he didn’t deserve to help himself. 

“What are you going to do?” She asked, softly. He pressed his lips together and she watched as his eyebrows pulled in, confused. “Instead of going back to Ark.”

“I live there, Clarke,” he said. “I’ve got things I need to take care of.”

“You should apply to school.” His face was plain, schooled into carefully practiced calmness. But there was something beneath and she knew it. She just had to poke at the right spot. “It’s what you want, isn’t it?” He had a book in his pocket everywhere he went. He hated that he had to drop out all those years ago, he’d let it slip he kept the textbooks in a box in his basement back home, just in case. Just because he couldn’t bear to get rid of them. He was meant for more, he deserved it, and deep down, that pull in his chest knew it. She just wanted to give it a tug, remind him. 

“It’s not as simple as that.”

“Sure it is,” she said. “You apply. You get in. You go.” He opened his mouth to protest, but she carried on, not letting him get a word in. “You don’t have to be full time. You can do part time and still work if you’re worried about Octavia. And you don’t have to worry about your mom’s medicine anymore--”

“Clarke…”

“You can get scholarships,” she said. He was smart. She knew he was smart. He was bound to qualify for a hundred different scholarships. He could do this. 

“Yeah, except I’m going to have to apply for those. And for school.” He shook his head. When his eyes met hers they were wide and wanting, but far, far away. “I haven’t been to school in years Clarke. It’s not as easy as going right out of high school.”

It wasn’t fair. She felt a sharp pang in the middle of her ribs and she wanted to scream at how unfair it was that he couldn’t do what he wanted to do. That he couldn’t see himself deserving it. 

“I can help,” she said. “I’ll help you apply. I’ll find scholarships, and I’ll help you figure everything out.”

His fingers reach over to hers across the table, squeezing her hand inside his. 

“When, Clarke?” He smiled at her, making it worse. “Tonight? Tomorrow?” He looked away from her face and focused on their hands. “I think you’ve forgotten where we are.”

She watched his fingers dance over hers, and she searched for something to say, but there wasn’t anything. He was right. 

“Hey.”

His voice startled her out of her thoughts. She raised an eyebrow at him. 

“Want to split a piece of pie?” He smile was warm and wide and forgiving. She nodded and she felt him squeeze her hand before flagging down a waitress. 

*** 

Clarke had been quiet throughout the rest of their dinner. She’d smile and laugh with him when he poked at her, but she kept her eyes down, stuck on his hands, unless he called her name, pulling her up. 

They left the cafe with slow, dragging steps, not wanting to end the day because meeting the sun tomorrow meant making a decision. 

“There was a music shop we passed around the corner, if you wanted…” he trailed off.  _ If you wanted to drag the day out longer _ , is what he meant. What he should have said. Let her know that he wanted to stretch it out as long as possible. 

“Yeah,” she said. “That sounds good.”

She laced her hands in his and he reminded himself to map how her hand felt on his skin, so tomorrow he could make it out himself. 

They wandered around the shop, Clarke pointing at records, telling him stories she was reminded of by them, leaning into him, singing her favorite bits of songs low in his ear. She grabbed his arm at one point, her fingers wrapped around his bicep and swayed with him back and forth as her favorite song came on the store speakers. 

She tried to guess Octavia’s favorite record, and Miller’s, then his. She’d pull record after record out of the stacks, raising an eyebrow, stating her case. 

“Come on,” she said. “That mixtape? This is definitely Miller’s favorite album.”

It had a picture of an old death rocker on the sleeve, black hair spiked up, face painted in black and white makeup. She folded her fingers in the  _ rock ‘n roll _ sign and stuck her tongue out mimicking the pose of the artist.

“Oh, right,” he teased. “You got it. That’s Miller’s favorite, no need to guess anymore.”

She got caught up in flipping through the records again, wandering from aisle to aisle and he slipped away for a moment, keeping her in his line of sight as he meandered through the cramped rows of the store. 

He bumped into a stand, and cassette tapes went flying around his feet. Bending to pick them up he noticed the one by his right foot,  _ The Temptations _ . He smiled to himself and tucked it inside the palm of his hand while he picked the rest of them up. With a glance over his shoulder, he saw Clarke tucked away in a corner of the store, so he made his way over to the register. 

“Just this,” he said, putting it down on the counter. He handed some money over to the cashier. “I don’t need a bag, thanks.” 

The cashier ripped the receipt and handed it over to him with the tape, and Bellamy tucked it into his pocket. By the time he’d wandered back over to Clarke, the same cashier was announcing the store was closing. 

“Ready?” he asked, popping up behind her. She jumped a bit, steadying herself with a hand on his arm as she nodded. 

“Yeah,” she said. “Let’s go.”

***

The words from the cafe were hanging in the air when they got to the hotel room. 

He wanted to tell her it was okay. He appreciated what she was trying to do, but it was okay. He’d go back to Ark and fall into the same slot, and it wouldn’t be any better but it wouldn’t be any worse, and it was fine. Some greater things just weren’t meant to be.

“Clarke,” he started, as soon as their bags were on the ground and the door was closed behind them. “I don’t want you to...I don’t know, feel bad or anything. Because of what I said at dinner.”

She turned toward him, walking closer with each word. 

“You’re amazing for offering what you did. And it sucks that it can’t happen, it really really sucks. But it’s fine. It’ll be fine.”

She was pressed up against him then, her hands resting over his chest, her fingers dipping into the collar of his shirt, making fists around the fabric. 

“Okay,” she nodded. Her voice a whisper. “Okay.”

He opened his mouth to keep going, to tell her what it meant have her say it anyway, even though they both knew where they were, what they were, but she stopped him by pressing her lips to his, pulling him in tighter and closer by the collar of his shirt. 

She pulled away from the kiss, falling back on the heels of her feet, her forehead dropping against his chin. 

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said into his neck. She pressed a kiss into his pulse, down his neck, dropped against his collarbone. 

His hands reached around her back, pushing up the thin fabric of her shirt, his hands resting on the warm skin of the small of her back. 

“Okay,” he said, mimicking her.  “Okay.”

*** 

He slept with her back pressed into his chest, his arms wrapped around her and her hair falling uncomfortably into his face. He woke from the tingling of the arm underneath her having fallen asleep but her didn’t move her, just readjusted, so the prickling faded away before his eyes drooped closed. 

She woke in the middle of the night, her legs slotted between his, and she turned around, facing him. She watched him for a moment, floating between sleep and wake, waiting to see if he’d surface while she watched him, but his breathing kept steady, so she buried her face in his neck, breathing him in before her eyes fluttered closed. 

***

“Clarke!”

She turned around, her hand above her brow to block out the sun, just in time to see Bellamy snap a picture. He’d bought a disposable camera from the hotel gift shop before they’d left that morning and he’d been annoyingly snapping away all day. 

_ “Going to sightsee, right?” _ he’d said at her questioning glance.  _ “Might as well remember the sights.” _

She rolled her eyes and lowered her arm as she walked back over to him. The sun was washing over them, glowing off of Bellamy like he was just part of it, and she’d had the urge all day to slot into his side. She wanted to. She probably could. 

It had to be allowed, right? After sleeping with someone three times, you were allowed to fall into them and wait for them to hold you. That was allowed. 

All day she’d been overthinking it. She’d taken her sketch pad along with her, drawing him every time she’d had the urge to get too affectionate, to touch him too much. Her book was filled with pages and pages of his hands and his neck, and his eyes. 

It was the most she’d seen him smile. Standing there, under the sun with the crappy plastic camera in his hand, sunglasses perched on his nose, book tucked into his back pocket. He’d snap a picture and flash her a smile, and she’d reach for her sketch pad and etch him into the pages.

“That was supposed to be for seeing the sights.”

“Who says it wasn’t?” he teased, sticking his tongue out at her. 

He held the camera up again and she pushed her sunglasses down from the top of her head and let them fall against the bridge of her nose, posing with her tongue out and two fingers up in a peace sign. 

“Perfect,” he said.

***

It was like that the whole first day. And the next. Walking from sight to sight. Stopping in restaurants. Sharing meals. Stopping in shops along the roads, teasing each other. 

Finding a hand next to hers when the weight of everything came back to her, in bursts like it always had a way of doing. A hand she could reach out and grab, one that wouldn’t poke or pry or judge, but would just hold her and understand. One that would reach for hers when he needed it too, waiting for her to hold back. 

Three days since they’d gotten there, three days they’d been able to breathe. 

She didn’t see her father around every corner like she thought she would. She didn’t feel like she was seeing something without him, it wasn’t even about him anymore. He’d given her the push, he’d set her on the road, and then she’d tumbled into Bellamy and found her way there. 

The problem was time. And what she was going to do when it was all over. 

Her mother’s voice rang in her head at the end of every night, waking her up at the start of every day. Not pestering but wondering, growing worried and curious and it was hard to push away because it started to blend with all her own thoughts. 

He could see it, she knew he could. And she had to tell him.

But then he’d smile at her and hold his camera up, or he’d take her hand and show her something and suddenly she’d think that all of it could wait. 

***

His arm was wrapped around her, pulling her in closer to him, until their heads were sharing a pillow, the third night in the city. 

“We’ve got to talk about it,” he said simply. 

“No,” she shook her head. “We don’t.”

He smiled at her softly, and pecked her forehead. He pressed his nose into her cheek, his eyes closed and just breathed her in. 

“We’ve handled worse,” he said, dryly. “I think we can get through this.”

She sighed. He was right. She hated how that was starting to become a pattern. 

She hated how it was a pattern she wasn’t going to have forever. 

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said. Her voice cracked on the last word and she squeezed her eyes shut, willing the tears to go back, to stay where they were at least. It wasn’t right when she thought of going back, starting back in school, meeting with her professors to figure out what to do about the time she missed. 

But it wasn’t right staying there either. Opting out of making a decision. 

She melted into the feel of his hands on her waist and she knew that it was cowardly for her to stay, to keep running away, to give up everything she had just because she wasn’t sure. It wasn’t something he would ever do, and she knew, in the back of his mind, even if he said otherwise, he’d think less of her if she did. 

She took a deep breath. 

“But I think I have to go home to figure it out.” 

There was a small part of her that thought maybe he’d tap into the Bellamy from a few days ago and find a way to argue with her about it. Tell her she was being stupid and throwing away everything she had again by leaving just when she was starting something. But he just nodded, biting his lip. 

“I feel like I’m...different now,” she confessed softly. “Is that stupid? It’s only been a few days, and I can’t explain how but something has shifted, you know? It’s all different. And you...I can’t run away and let myself slip out of making a decision just because it’s easier.”

“You could.” His words were a whisper and there was a sad smile playing on his face. He didn’t mean it. 

“You would never do something like that though,” she said. “And I think that if you can be as brave as you’ve been your whole life, I can be brave enough to go home.”

She felt it when the tears finally leaked out, streaming down face in hot, wet strips. She felt the pad of his thumb brush them away and she shook her head like it was going to change something. 

“Even if it sucks,” she said. 

He barked out a laugh and she let herself look at his eyes for the first time in the whole conversation. They were red and watery, but he wasn’t crying. And there was a hint of a smile in the corner, one he put there on purpose to make her feel better. 

“And it really, really sucks doesn’t it?” he said. 

“Ha,” she coughed. “Yeah. It really does.”

She pushed herself in closer, and she felt his shirt grow wet from the tears leaking from her into the fabric. His arms wrapped around her tighter and she tried to remember the first thought she had when she saw him for the first time. 

_ Might as well _ , she’d thought. She felt a laugh bubble out of her when she thought of it.  

“Hey,” she said. “Talk to me about something else.”

*** 

He’d stepped out of the room the next morning when she called the airline. Went searching for a vending machine or a payphone or something else to do while she sat on the phone, getting a flight back home planned. He sat slumped outside the room when he was done wandering, waiting for her to finish up. 

He heard the door creak open and Clarke’s head peek out. 

“Hey,” he said standing up. 

“Hey.” She was leaned up against the doorframe, arms crossed over her chest. “Think you can give me a ride?”

*** 

He felt her hand on his, halfway between their hotel on the airport. He felt it crawling up his arm, moving over from his arm to his leg, resting on his thigh. 

“Pull over,” she said.

They listened to the slow roll of the tires from the road, crunching in the loose gravel just off the shoulder. As soon as it was parked, Clarke turned to him, unbuckling her seatbelt. 

Her lips were on his before he could ask what was wrong, and before she could explain, he was knotting his fingers in her hair and pressing her down into the seat. He heard a thud and realized she’d hit her head against the passenger side door. 

“You okay?” he asked, breathless. 

She scooted herself back, a few inches between the top of her head and the door, and pulled him back down on top of her. “Yeah, yeah, I’m good.” 

*** 

As soon as he pulled into the parking lot, Clarke was hopped out of her seat, walking around to the bed of the truck to grab her bag. She was going so quickly, she wasn’t even looking at him, and he had to scramble out of his seat to catch her before she managed to pull her bag out. His hand was on hers before she could turn away from the truck. 

“Hang on a sec,” he said. He reached into his pocket and fished out the tape from the other day. He held up a finger when she opened her mouth to ask him, and popped it in the stereo, turning the volume up a bit.

With a roll of the window crank, he opened it wide as he shut the door, the music blaring out beside them. 

“Didn’t have time to make you a mixtape,” he said into her ear as he pulled her close. 

Her eyes were skeptical, waiting to see what song he was playing, but a slow smile spread across her cheeks as the lyrics wormed their way out of the window toward them. 

_ Well, you could have been anything that you wanted to _

_ And I can tell,  _

_ The way you do the things you do _ . 

“Nerd,” she teased, pressing her body into his. Her body swayed from side to side and she felt as his chest slotted in with hers, bumping from left to right with the beat as he grabbed her hands. 

“Whatever,” he said. “It’s a good song.”

“Yeah,” she sighed. “It is.” 

He tried to ignore the pounding in his chest as the song went on, getting closer and closer to the time to say goodbye. Closer and closer to the time he’d watch her walk away and he’d pile himself back into the truck, pull back on the road and sit at an intersection listening to the turn signal click, wondering which way he was going to go.

Clarke was right though. Where they were may not look so different from where they started from, but something had shifted. It was all different. 

He felt her hands pressed into his back and he knew that it was different. 

He heard the song end and the tape skip right over to the next, and he stepped back, looking down at Clarke. Her shoes bent and she pushed herself up on her toes to land a small kiss on his cheek before sliding back down. But he caught her around the waist, holding her in place to chase it, pressing his lips to hers as he lowered her the rest of the way back down. 

He reached in through the window and ejected the tape, pressing it back into it’s case with a click before handing it over to her, pressing it into her palm. 

“So,” he said, bobbing on the balls of his feet. “Thanks for the company, I guess.” 

“Yeah,” she said, voice watery. “Thanks for the cassette.”

He nodded, avoiding her eye as he reached into the bed of the truck and pulled out her bag, handing it over to her. The metal of the truck felt warm against his skin as he leaned into it, and he planted his feet firmly, sinking them into the ground where he was so he wouldn’t do something stupid like go after her. 

The bag scratched his arm as she pulled him in for one last hug. 

“I know it’s not the end of the world,” she said. He could feel the wind wrap around them, sending shivers down his spine. “But it really feels like the end of something.” She slipped something into his pocket. “Thank you, Bellamy.”

Her footsteps were soft as they walked away from her, the sounds of passing cars and overhead planes drowning them out, so he wasn’t sure how long it took her to walk away from him and into the airport. He waited a few minutes pressed against the side of his truck, the wind whistling as it whipped through the open window of the passenger side door. 

He waited until he got back in the driver's seat before taking out the slip of folded paper she’d put in his pocket. The sound of it crinkling as he unfolded it filled the car. 

He laughed as he saw it was the  _ Road Rules _ sheet she’d made up that first day. A note scribbled at the bottom caught his eye. 

_ Left something for you in the box of cassettes since you never followed the music rule.  _

_ I expect a full report. XO, Clarke.  _

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i expect a full report. XO, Steph.

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know your thoughts! And come find me on [tumblr](%E2%80%9Dofhobbitsandwomen.tumblr.com%E2%80%9D) !


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